Reminds me of this ICE contract for billion dollar detention facilities … to some random unknown company registered to a single family home with no working phone number or website
This administration has had mass corruption and grift, taking from taxpayers and handing it to friends and family of Trump
tkel 23 hours ago [-]
It's nothing new, the Pentagon has failed 8 audits in a row. In just one year (2022), $220 Billion dollars of their spending were totally unaccounted for.
cyanydeez 17 hours ago [-]
that audit has nothing to do with the president of the united states enriching themselves and frieds. If you want to go look at that audit, the summary usually is: the DoD can't place a bunch of black money going to CIA programs to do whatever shit they get up to.
It's not an equivalence of any merit.
huflungdung 1 days ago [-]
One dell power edge with a “do not unplug”
kenjackson 1 days ago [-]
I really don’t understand how so many people can support this admin. It’s not that I ideologically disagree with them, but they are so corrupt that they appear incompetent. They actually aren’t incompetent, they just don’t care about what is important to almost everyone else. If you, for example, don’t care about public safety or accountability it turns out you can make a lot of money.
atty 1 days ago [-]
The federal government and the executive branch has a well specified set of responsibilities to the people of this country, and they are massively failing at just about every metric. So yes, they are truly incompetent.
jmcgough 1 days ago [-]
They aren't interested in those responsibilities, just enriching themselves and attacking their enemies.
DesaiAshu 1 days ago [-]
A lot of us are coming to terms with "tier-1" venture firms like a16z tolerating corruption and ethics violations to support financial deregulation (crypto, prediction markets) and AI deregulation
Polymarket is even running ragebait ads[1] about Trump's corruption, while his son (profiting from the corruption) sits on the board
The word you are looking for is "greed", and it is ripping apart the moral fabric of this country
All regulation does is centralize the power to a few big players, which are corrupted themselves, and then they get little slaps on the wrist whenever they're caught by being fined 0.01% of their annual profits and then bailed out when they royally fuck up.
Degenroll 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pjmlp 19 hours ago [-]
Like in every dictorship, they succeed because enough people rather profit from administration, rather than fighting with their moral and join the resistance movements, with all implications to their personal life.
mistrial9 18 hours ago [-]
similar to the Google-Facebook surveillance Capitalism that funded so many D-pols?
.. before this devolves into simple polarity jab posts.. taxation-based Big Gov seems very eager to embrace and extend constant tracking of location via devices.. social attribution profiles are maybe less so, maybe?
hard to see the positives in the new social dynamics, from either base in the US, from this chair
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
History has proven how capitalism is eager to work with such kind of governments.
Shareholders tend to not have morals as long as money keeps pumping into their bank accounts.
They are responsible for much of the sad state of affairs across the planet, now they even offer gold statuses back home, for little favours.
KetoManx64 1 hours ago [-]
This is the very definition of crony capitalism.
Capitalism without any government intervention/ force hasn't been a thing in a very long time.
smallmancontrov 1 days ago [-]
Information bubbles are wicked. I'm visiting family over the long weekend and they are all convinced that Trump is a selfless holy crusader against fraud who is finding so much Democrat fraud that he deserves a little side action :|
ramraj07 1 days ago [-]
Thats not a bubble though, thats just Stockholm syndrome or genuine acceptance of this behavior as being acceptable or even perfect.
michaelmrose 1 days ago [-]
That's not just an information bubble it's stupidity sometimes but not always with a side order of racism.
The entire notion of somehow deserving to be corrupt as well is an indication of not just being unethical but literally not understanding what ethics looks like.
We have to come to terms with the idea that half of America is neither intelligent nor good people.
doctoboggan 1 days ago [-]
There is a vast, hugely funded, and incredibly adept propaganda machine aimed at about half the country. They use all channels available to them, as well as much of the machinery that surveillance capitalism has built to paint a picture that is very different from reality.
Many people’s access to virtually all their information is mediated through this propaganda machine. It’s frankly incredible that there are even any stories of people deep within it eventually breaking out seeing as how well functioning it all is.
Is this a conspiracy theory? Sort of I guess, but it seems pretty obvious to me. And no, I don’t think “my side” would be immune to a similar machine speaking the language we like to hear, but I just think that hasn’t happened (yet), and I hope I can be one of those to break out of it does happen.
alecthomas 1 days ago [-]
> There is a vast, hugely funded, and incredibly adept propaganda machine aimed at about half the country.
There are propaganda machines directed at everyone.
> And no, I don’t think “my side” would be immune to a similar machine speaking the language we like to hear, but I just think that hasn’t happened (yet)
It seems incredibly naive to believe that propaganda in this age isn't utilised by all "sides". My base assumption for any information, particularly from mainstream media, is that it's biased one way or the other.
doctoboggan 1 days ago [-]
I didn't say "my side" doesn't utilize propaganda, I said there isn't a vast, hugely funded, and incredibly adept propaganda machine aimed at my side.
16 hours ago [-]
chii 19 hours ago [-]
> ...aimed at my side.
that's how you know it's successful.
aprilthird2021 1 days ago [-]
It's hard to buy that this is the sole reason. All the facts are out there and were out there before the election. The number one issue people cited in election polls was the economy. And Trump had a well stated economic policy that decades of knowledge of economics has shown us is a bad idea.
Ultimately voters run the US. It's our responsibility to do the research and make an informed decision. Propaganda has existed forever. You can't ban all propaganda, so it's hard for me to not still point the finger at the people who voted for this
michaelmrose 1 days ago [-]
How can you idealogically agree with them especially when the only idealogy they have is greed and bigotry.
afavour 1 days ago [-]
I’ll save you a click: yes, of course it was a no bid contract. And:
> The procurement did not require the system to clear FedRAMP, the government’s security review for cloud systems handling sensitive data, before deployment. It described no independent audit, congressional notification or outside review of how the system would be used.
I don’t know how the US charts a path back from all this. There are going to be so many breaches to fix.
Revanche1367 1 days ago [-]
There is no path back. Even if the next administration overturns ICE and its activities and dissolves all contracts related to them, there is no reason to think the US govt will not keep using any and all technologies or services obtained in the name of security, regardless of party, even if they have to do so with deep secrecy.
noir_lord 11 hours ago [-]
Also nothing prevents Trump v2.0 in 4 years after that since all the conditions will still exist in 4 years.
For anyone outside the US (including me), it's dismaying.
It's not like any of us thought the US was perfect (at least those of who like history, no country is and the US has more issues than many) but they just straight took the wheel and swerved it into a wall.
mikeyouse 1 days ago [-]
Torn between anger at all the incompetent chucklefucks getting rich off taxpayer money and gratitude at them bestowing these contracts on useless sycophants instead of competent organizations..
pryce 1 days ago [-]
I have a strong suspicion the rationale for how they select providers on will turn out to be kickbacks and self-dealing.
GolfPopper 1 days ago [-]
>I don’t know how the US charts a path back from all this.
There isn't one. And the sooner we all come to terms with that, the better off we and posterity will be. The constitutional government of the United States failed long before January 20th, 2025. Chasing sunk costs on this scale as futile, even if the alternatives are terrifying.
In my opinion, the best, just, course forward is a Constitutional Convention that dissolves the United States Government and replaces it with nothing. Let the states and territories govern themselves as they choose, and work out needed compacts and agreements going forward.
jadbox 1 days ago [-]
Boggles my mind you'd even imagine a positive scenario here. Let the states choose? This is not only how we kept slavery going by letting states drive, but it also caused a civic war when we had no federal coordination.
Nay, we must reform and reclaim a just federal government. Letting states drive themselves will turn the country into extreme violence.
esseph 17 hours ago [-]
> Letting states drive themselves will turn the country into extreme violence.
Who days that doesn't happen now? Seems like wishful thinking.
esseph 1 days ago [-]
The states should be free to choose their own course.
Citizens should be allowed to move freely between them.
May the best governance win.
20 hours ago [-]
smallmancontrov 1 days ago [-]
You are wildly underestimating the difficulty of building anew. Fortunately, you are also overestimating the impossibility of coming back from organizational trauma.
esseph 1 days ago [-]
You may be underestimating the historical significance of the moment a critical percentage of a population loses faith in its institutions.
21 hours ago [-]
myko 1 days ago [-]
He should've been locked up on January 7th. That was the death knell.
era-epoch 1 days ago [-]
The current US administration is already on the multiple-decades level of cleanup, and looking at the political group nominally tasked with doing said cleanup, the more likely answer would seem to be "never".
0xbadcafebee 1 days ago [-]
Technically you could already win contracts without all those things, there are like a thousand loopholes. FedRAMP in particular only really covers cloud hosting, there are other DoD standards you have to follow for more specific systems. And if the agency isn't DoD, I don't think they apply anyway.
If we had a software building code that applied to digital infrastructure in general, the way building codes apply to buildings in general, and electrical codes apply to electrical installation in general, this wouldn't be an issue, because you'd need your shit together to make any software product. But nobody seems to mind companies making shit products and leaking all our data.
jmcgough 1 days ago [-]
How do we know there's any plan to accomplish this, and that this isn't just funneling $25M to a family member?
JohnMakin 1 days ago [-]
it’s over
black_13 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
kumarski 1 days ago [-]
I thought Altman's worldcoin was angling for this when they had people take photos of their eyeballs.... getting into the gov't contracting side of things.... surprises me some no-name company got it.
zombot 11 hours ago [-]
Altman's shitcoin has too much eye scanning and too few kickbacks.
0xbadcafebee 1 days ago [-]
So the police state has upgraded from papers to eyeballs
sneak 1 days ago [-]
> The award describes the purchase as covering iris biometric recognition technology and access to a biometric information system "to allow ICE agents to quickly authenticate the identity of subjects during field operations."
Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people.
This is federal shock troops (masked and unidentified, at that) gearing up for mass scale human rights violations. They are already flying facial recognition drones at extremely low altitudes over sidewalks in downtown LA and other places.
Borealid 1 days ago [-]
> Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people.
Could you cite a source for this?
If a law enforcement officer personally recognizes someone's face, I don't believe that it's illegal for them to know who the person is.
If a law enforcement officer turns to their non-cop buddy and asks "do you know this person?" and their buddy says "yeah that's Joe", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.
If a law enforcement officer picks up a phone and describes the person's face to their non-cop buddy and the buddy says "that sounds like Joe's face you're describing", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.
You can see where this is going, right? At what point does it become illegal to look up a person's face in a store of the-way-faces-look? Where does that become the "forcible identification" you're talking about?
Generally speaking, people expose their faces in public, and so those exposed faces can be remembered, photographed, and recalled without the person's consent or any warrant. This is legal in the USA - there is no expectation of privacy in a public space, and the police don't have to give you any more privacy than a private citizen would. They just cannot search you - and looking at your face, and potentially recognizing it, is not a search.
oyashirochama 1 days ago [-]
The only arguement I can see, is that the police should also not expect any privacy and have their names and faces visable, but thats the only relatively modern issue I've had.
And maybe no database that is always on and always accessable state and federal wide, since thats removing just general public exposure expectation.
lelandfe 19 hours ago [-]
> They just cannot search you
If instead of looking up your name in a name list, I look up your face in a face list, ain’t that searching?
I feel like what you’re ultimately asking hinges on when, legally, a photo turns into biometrics.
Borealid 19 hours ago [-]
No, looking up your face in a list of faces is searching FOR you, not searching you.
Searching you means taking an inventory of the items on your person. It does not mean looking at you. In some cases, imaging you can be a "search" even where there is no physical contact (for example: a millimeter-wave scanner), but a photograph in a public place has never qualified as a "search" in the USA.
I understand your feelings, but so far as I know things like gait recognition, facial recognition, or even an iris scan derived from an ordinary photograph have never qualified as a "search" under U.S. law. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this: it's quite difficult to prove something has _not_ happened.
I think the legal line is not when it "becomes biometrics" or becomes identification. The legal line is when you are revealing a private property about an individual (for example, their blood type, or the contents of their pockets). Nothing visible to the naked eye in public is considered private, so nothing that derives identity from that public information is a "search".
As a nice easy example... an officer smelling alchohol on the breath of a person in the course of a conversation is not a "search". An officer compelling that same person to breathe into a breathalyzer machine is. Applying the same standard to faces, you cannot make an individual put their eye to a scanner without reasonable suspicion, but if you can get a biometric scan from the invidual as they happen to walk about their day, doing that isn't searching them...
simoncion 11 hours ago [-]
> Applying the same standard to faces, you cannot make an individual put their eye to a scanner without reasonable suspicion, but if you can get a biometric scan from the invidual as they happen to walk about their day, doing that isn't searching them...
There's a different standard that could apply with just a small amount of tweaking.
Many people's homes happen to leak IR out of their poorly-insulated windows, walls, and roofs. Anyone (police included) can get an IR camera and determine facts about what's going on in such a house. However, police must obtain a search warrant before doing so... despite the fact that the design of such a house means that it broadcasts all that information indiscriminately while one goes about one's day and the twin facts that IR cameras aren't dreadfully expensive and are available to anyone with the funds to get one.
The Supreme Court case that determined this hinges in part on things that would "previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion". This logic could be tweaked to cover things that would "previously have been unknowable without physical detention". The core problem with searches has never been the inconvenience involved in the search... it has always been the fact that you're being searched. New tech that removes the physical imposition of a type of search does not solve this problem. A long while back [0] NYPD was deploying mobile microwave scanners that they used to perform indiscriminate under-clothes searches of people who were committing the "crime" of being in public going about their day. IIRC, they wrapped this in «We're just looking for weapons, and it's only a pilot program, anyway!» language, but that doesn't change the fact that they were performing "stop and frisk" searches at scale.
[0] And maybe they're still doing this... I've not paid much attention to NYC's law enforcement insanity in quite a while.
Borealid 11 hours ago [-]
The interior of the house is a private space. Things under your clothes are too. Revealing either of these things through whatever technology is a search.
The standard is whether something expected to be private is revealed. What your eyes look like (even in detail) is not that. There isn't a point on some line where the photograph becoming higher-quality applies a different standard than a low-resolution photo would.
simoncion 1 days ago [-]
> Could you cite a source for this?
Many states (something like half) in the US don't require people to respond to police requests to identify themselves.
While the courts might end up claiming that being grabbed by several cops and having an iris scanner forced onto one's face is "not testimonial" and therefor not covered by existing laws that permit one to not have to identify oneself, I would argue that such an outcome is -heh- rules lawyering and intensely unjust. IMNSHO the justice system should actively avoid producing unjust outcomes.
Yes, that appears to be the whole thing.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/488+State+Rd+%231,+Plymout...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/acquisition-log...
This administration has had mass corruption and grift, taking from taxpayers and handing it to friends and family of Trump
It's not an equivalence of any merit.
Polymarket is even running ragebait ads[1] about Trump's corruption, while his son (profiting from the corruption) sits on the board
The word you are looking for is "greed", and it is ripping apart the moral fabric of this country
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DYmu4RJnFrF/?img_index=11
.. before this devolves into simple polarity jab posts.. taxation-based Big Gov seems very eager to embrace and extend constant tracking of location via devices.. social attribution profiles are maybe less so, maybe?
hard to see the positives in the new social dynamics, from either base in the US, from this chair
Shareholders tend to not have morals as long as money keeps pumping into their bank accounts.
They are responsible for much of the sad state of affairs across the planet, now they even offer gold statuses back home, for little favours.
The entire notion of somehow deserving to be corrupt as well is an indication of not just being unethical but literally not understanding what ethics looks like.
We have to come to terms with the idea that half of America is neither intelligent nor good people.
Many people’s access to virtually all their information is mediated through this propaganda machine. It’s frankly incredible that there are even any stories of people deep within it eventually breaking out seeing as how well functioning it all is.
Is this a conspiracy theory? Sort of I guess, but it seems pretty obvious to me. And no, I don’t think “my side” would be immune to a similar machine speaking the language we like to hear, but I just think that hasn’t happened (yet), and I hope I can be one of those to break out of it does happen.
There are propaganda machines directed at everyone.
> And no, I don’t think “my side” would be immune to a similar machine speaking the language we like to hear, but I just think that hasn’t happened (yet)
It seems incredibly naive to believe that propaganda in this age isn't utilised by all "sides". My base assumption for any information, particularly from mainstream media, is that it's biased one way or the other.
that's how you know it's successful.
Ultimately voters run the US. It's our responsibility to do the research and make an informed decision. Propaganda has existed forever. You can't ban all propaganda, so it's hard for me to not still point the finger at the people who voted for this
> The procurement did not require the system to clear FedRAMP, the government’s security review for cloud systems handling sensitive data, before deployment. It described no independent audit, congressional notification or outside review of how the system would be used.
I don’t know how the US charts a path back from all this. There are going to be so many breaches to fix.
For anyone outside the US (including me), it's dismaying.
It's not like any of us thought the US was perfect (at least those of who like history, no country is and the US has more issues than many) but they just straight took the wheel and swerved it into a wall.
There isn't one. And the sooner we all come to terms with that, the better off we and posterity will be. The constitutional government of the United States failed long before January 20th, 2025. Chasing sunk costs on this scale as futile, even if the alternatives are terrifying.
In my opinion, the best, just, course forward is a Constitutional Convention that dissolves the United States Government and replaces it with nothing. Let the states and territories govern themselves as they choose, and work out needed compacts and agreements going forward.
Nay, we must reform and reclaim a just federal government. Letting states drive themselves will turn the country into extreme violence.
Who days that doesn't happen now? Seems like wishful thinking.
Citizens should be allowed to move freely between them.
May the best governance win.
If we had a software building code that applied to digital infrastructure in general, the way building codes apply to buildings in general, and electrical codes apply to electrical installation in general, this wouldn't be an issue, because you'd need your shit together to make any software product. But nobody seems to mind companies making shit products and leaking all our data.
Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people.
This is federal shock troops (masked and unidentified, at that) gearing up for mass scale human rights violations. They are already flying facial recognition drones at extremely low altitudes over sidewalks in downtown LA and other places.
Could you cite a source for this?
If a law enforcement officer personally recognizes someone's face, I don't believe that it's illegal for them to know who the person is.
If a law enforcement officer turns to their non-cop buddy and asks "do you know this person?" and their buddy says "yeah that's Joe", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.
If a law enforcement officer picks up a phone and describes the person's face to their non-cop buddy and the buddy says "that sounds like Joe's face you're describing", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.
You can see where this is going, right? At what point does it become illegal to look up a person's face in a store of the-way-faces-look? Where does that become the "forcible identification" you're talking about?
Generally speaking, people expose their faces in public, and so those exposed faces can be remembered, photographed, and recalled without the person's consent or any warrant. This is legal in the USA - there is no expectation of privacy in a public space, and the police don't have to give you any more privacy than a private citizen would. They just cannot search you - and looking at your face, and potentially recognizing it, is not a search.
And maybe no database that is always on and always accessable state and federal wide, since thats removing just general public exposure expectation.
If instead of looking up your name in a name list, I look up your face in a face list, ain’t that searching?
I feel like what you’re ultimately asking hinges on when, legally, a photo turns into biometrics.
Searching you means taking an inventory of the items on your person. It does not mean looking at you. In some cases, imaging you can be a "search" even where there is no physical contact (for example: a millimeter-wave scanner), but a photograph in a public place has never qualified as a "search" in the USA.
I understand your feelings, but so far as I know things like gait recognition, facial recognition, or even an iris scan derived from an ordinary photograph have never qualified as a "search" under U.S. law. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this: it's quite difficult to prove something has _not_ happened.
I think the legal line is not when it "becomes biometrics" or becomes identification. The legal line is when you are revealing a private property about an individual (for example, their blood type, or the contents of their pockets). Nothing visible to the naked eye in public is considered private, so nothing that derives identity from that public information is a "search".
As a nice easy example... an officer smelling alchohol on the breath of a person in the course of a conversation is not a "search". An officer compelling that same person to breathe into a breathalyzer machine is. Applying the same standard to faces, you cannot make an individual put their eye to a scanner without reasonable suspicion, but if you can get a biometric scan from the invidual as they happen to walk about their day, doing that isn't searching them...
There's a different standard that could apply with just a small amount of tweaking.
Many people's homes happen to leak IR out of their poorly-insulated windows, walls, and roofs. Anyone (police included) can get an IR camera and determine facts about what's going on in such a house. However, police must obtain a search warrant before doing so... despite the fact that the design of such a house means that it broadcasts all that information indiscriminately while one goes about one's day and the twin facts that IR cameras aren't dreadfully expensive and are available to anyone with the funds to get one.
The Supreme Court case that determined this hinges in part on things that would "previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion". This logic could be tweaked to cover things that would "previously have been unknowable without physical detention". The core problem with searches has never been the inconvenience involved in the search... it has always been the fact that you're being searched. New tech that removes the physical imposition of a type of search does not solve this problem. A long while back [0] NYPD was deploying mobile microwave scanners that they used to perform indiscriminate under-clothes searches of people who were committing the "crime" of being in public going about their day. IIRC, they wrapped this in «We're just looking for weapons, and it's only a pilot program, anyway!» language, but that doesn't change the fact that they were performing "stop and frisk" searches at scale.
[0] And maybe they're still doing this... I've not paid much attention to NYC's law enforcement insanity in quite a while.
The standard is whether something expected to be private is revealed. What your eyes look like (even in detail) is not that. There isn't a point on some line where the photograph becoming higher-quality applies a different standard than a low-resolution photo would.
Many states (something like half) in the US don't require people to respond to police requests to identify themselves.
While the courts might end up claiming that being grabbed by several cops and having an iris scanner forced onto one's face is "not testimonial" and therefor not covered by existing laws that permit one to not have to identify oneself, I would argue that such an outcome is -heh- rules lawyering and intensely unjust. IMNSHO the justice system should actively avoid producing unjust outcomes.