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ICE's 'Frightening' Facial Recognition App is Scanning US Citizens Without Their Consent
(www.commondreams.org)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Does the US legal system still exist in any sense that it should in a democracy?
I ask because I don't understand how all this is possible in a constitutional state: Masked brutes who arbitrarily kidnap people on the open street without even identifying themselves, people who are interned without due process and then often simply disappear without a trace in the administrative system, total surveillance without cause, and many other massive violations that the US legal system seems to enable rather than prevent, as it should.
All of this already looks very much like a dictatorship to me, i.e., an unjust state, as none of this can be possible with a democratic constitution - at least not with one that is actually upheld by the legal system.
It does not. The legal system has essentially lost the ability to be a check on the power of the executive branch. Partly because of the capture of the judiciary and regulatory bodies by right-wing extremists and partly because of the speed at which the executive branch is acting illegally - it takes time to build cases and the jsutice system can't keep up.
At a certain point, we should just arrest the President, Vice President, and cabinet while we work through the paperwork. I don't know much about Chuck Grassley, but he can run things while we get through the trials.