Facial recognition is coming to US airports, fast-tracked by Trump
Called Biometric Exit, the project would use facial matching systems to identify every visa holder as they leave the country. Passengers would have their photos taken immediately before boarding, to be matched with the passport-style photos provided with the visa application. If there’s no match in the system, it could be evidence that the visitor entered the country illegally. The system is currently being tested on a single flight from Atlanta to Tokyo, but after being expedited by the Trump administration, it’s expected to expand to more airports this summer, eventually rolling out to every international flight and border crossing in the US.
The President and the Bomb, Part III
But over the last few weeks, while working on this episode and my own further digging into the matter, I have become convinced that the weight of the open evidence points to the idea that Blair is correct — the Secretary of Defense is not just unnecessary, but not even in the nuclear chain of command. What convinced me?
First, I found perhaps the only piece of military doctrine that actually explained, in a clear and concise fashion, how a nuclear order would be carried out. And it’s not some ancient Cold War archival document… it’s from 2015! On the website of the USAF’s (appropriately named) Curtis E. LeMay Center for Doctrine Development and Education, one can find ANNEX 3-72 NUCLEAR OPERATIONS, last updated in May 2015. It states, in a clarity that (after reading a lot of DOD doctrine) makes me want to weep with joy, despite the message:
The President may direct the use of nuclear weapons through an execute order via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the combatant commanders and, ultimately, to the forces in the field exercising direct control of the weapons.
Which seems pretty definitive. The order jumps immediately from the President to the military, in the form of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from there percolates through the system of command, control, and communication to the various people who actually turn the keys and put the “birds” into the air.
[…]
What would the military do in such a situation, if a correctly authenticated, correctly-formatted “execute order” came to them on their secure channels? I don’t have faith they’d abort it. Maybe you do — that’s fine, and I appreciate the company of optimists. But I just want to point out, the notion that the system won’t work as intended is not a real “check.” It’s just hoping things will break in a way that would be convenient.
The U.S. Government Is Trying to Unmask an Anonymous Anti-Trump Twitter Account
Soon after Donald Trump’s inauguration, persons critical of the president and his administration began creating anonymous Twitter accounts claiming to be dissident members of the federal government, such as the famous “Alt BLM” and “Rogue POTUS Staff” users. Today, Twitter is filing suit against the U.S. government, exposing an attempt to expose and attack one such account.
The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, says the @ALT_USCIS Twitter account is now being targeted by the Department of Homeland Security […]
crazy shot on air force one from reuters pic.twitter.com/ZyMAKBQKPy
— Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick)April 6, 2017
Trump’s War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised
From the start of his presidency, Donald Trump’s “war on terror” has entailed the seemingly indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people in the name of killing terrorists. In other words, Trump has escalated the 16-year-old core premise of America’s foreign policy — that it has the right to bomb any country in the world where people it regards as terrorists are found — and in doing so, has fulfilled the warped campaign pledges he repeatedly expressed.
The most recent atrocity was the killing of as many as 200 Iraqi civilians from U.S. airstrikes this week in Mosul. That was preceded a few days earlier by the killing of dozens of Syrian civilians in Raqqa province when the U.S. targeted a school where people had taken refuge, which itself was preceded a week earlier by the U.S. destruction of a mosque near Aleppo that also killed dozens. And one of Trump’s first military actions was what can only be described as a massacre carried out by Navy SEALs, in which 30 Yemenis were killed; among the children killed was an 8-year-old American girl (whose 16-year-old American brother was killed by a drone under Obama).
Dissecting Trump’s Most Rabid Online Following
President Donald Trump’s administration, in its turbulent first months, has drawn fire from both the left and the right, including the ACLU, government ethics accountability groups and former Bush administration officials. But one group has shown nothing but unbridled enthusiasm for the president’s actions thus far: the over 380,000 members of r/The_Donald, one of the thousands of comment boards on Reddit, the fifth-most-popular website in the U.S.
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We’ve adapted a technique that’s used in machine learning research — called latent semantic analysis — to characterize 50,323 active subreddits2 based on 1.4 billion comments posted from Jan. 1, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2016, in a way that allows us to quantify how similar in essence one subreddit is to another. At its heart, the analysis is based on commenter overlap: Two subreddits are deemed more similar if many commenters have posted often to both. This also makes it possible to do what we call “subreddit algebra”: adding one subreddit to another and seeing if the result resembles some third subreddit, or subtracting out a component of one subreddit’s character and seeing what’s left.
Trump publishes list of crimes committed by immigrants: the majority are Latinos who haven’t been convicted
Donald Trump’s government published for the first time Monday a list highlighting the nationalities of immigrants who were charged or convicted of crimes but were released by local authorities.
The report puts pressure on so-called sanctuary cities, highlighting jurisdictions that release immigrants who might be subject to deportation instead of transferring them into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The report, called the “ Weekly and Declined Detainer Outcome Report,” lists 206 declined “detainers,” or immigrants who were marked by ICE for possible deportation but who were released by law enforcement between January 28, 2017, and February 3, 2017. That’s out of a total 3,083 detainers issued throughout the country during that same period.
ICE requests that law enforcement hold these individuals for 48 hours before being released in order “to allow DHS to assume custody for removal purposes.”
i feel like its hard to avoid outrage fatigue of late, but this is particularly odious to me
oscar with the direct action pic.twitter.com/snnfdyXxtB
— Goth Ms. Frizzle (@spookperson)March 18, 2017
How The Queens Of Trump’s Youth Became The Diverse ‘Antithesis’ Of His Policies
Every year, over 26 million international passengers arrive or depart from runways on the shore of Jamaica Bay in Queens. JFK Airport is by far the busiest international gateway in the United States. Established in 1948 as Idlewild Airport and renamed after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, it has since welcomed millions of immigrants to the U.S. from every part of the world. Many of them have settled in Queens, which, with 2.3 million residents, nearly half of whom were born abroad, is by common reckoning the most diverse urban area on earth.
American Citizens: U.S. Border Agents Can Search Your Cellphone
In 25 cases examined by NBC News, American citizens said that CBP officers at airports and border crossings demanded that they hand over their phones and their passwords, or unlock them.
The travelers came from across the nation, and were both naturalized citizens and people born and raised on American soil. They traveled by plane and by car at different times through different states. Businessmen, couples, senior citizens, and families with young kids, questioned, searched, and detained for hours when they tried to enter or leave the U.S. None were on terror watchlists. One had a speeding ticket. Some were asked about their religion and their ethnic origins, and had the validity of their U.S. citizenship questioned.
What most of them have in common — 23 of the 25 — is that they are Muslim, like Shibly, whose parents are from Syria.
As part of an ad campaign for its original series The Man In The High Castle, Amazon recently launched Resistance Radio, a streaming station set, like the Philip K. Dick adaptation itself, in an alternate 1962 America run by fascists. The pre-recorded program features “bootleg songs” alongside interstitials where underground DJs talk about standing up to Nazis, urging listeners to keep the fight alive in a nation that’s been overrun by fear, oppression, and authoritarian rule. For whatever reason, some conservatives have interpreted this as being about Donald Trump. And faced with what appears to be such a strong anti-Nazi statement, and a call for people who still believe in American ideals to stand up against the country’s destruction, naturally these patriots have rushed to loudly denounce it.
Rogue Twitter Accounts Fight to Preserve the Voice of Government Science
The Alt_BLM account is one of dozens of “alt” and “rogue” federal agency accounts that launched shortly after Trump’s inauguration, operating under names like altEPA and Rogue POTUS Staff. A number of the accounts are administered by actual federal employees, including three that provided information to the Intercept indicating they work for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, and the Interior Department. Others are run by a cast of characters that includes a former military analyst who worked for the NSA, a union employee, an art student, and a Boeing employee. Most of them declined to be named out of fear of workplace retaliation and pressure to shut down their accounts.
sounds like the verified accounts right now are:
kreuzaderny