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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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
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 :|
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.
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.
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.
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..
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".
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.
>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.
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.
You are wildly underestimating the difficulty of building anew. Fortunately, you are also overestimating the impossibility of coming back from organizational trauma.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
This is their global headquarters.
Yes, that appears to be the whole thing.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/488+State+Rd+%231,+Plymout...
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
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 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.
One dell power edge with a “do not unplug”
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.
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.
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.
They aren't interested in those responsibilities, just enriching themselves and attacking their enemies.
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
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DYmu4RJnFrF/?img_index=11
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.
> 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.
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.
> ...aimed at my side.
that's how you know it's successful.
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
How can you idealogically agree with them especially when the only idealogy they have is greed and bigotry.
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 :|
Thats not a bubble though, thats just Stockholm syndrome or genuine acceptance of this behavior as being acceptable or even perfect.
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.
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.
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.
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..
I have a strong suspicion the rationale for how they select providers on will turn out to be kickbacks and self-dealing.
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".
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.
>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.
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.
The states should be free to choose their own course.
Citizens should be allowed to move freely between them.
May the best governance win.
You are wildly underestimating the difficulty of building anew. Fortunately, you are also overestimating the impossibility of coming back from organizational trauma.
You may be underestimating the historical significance of the moment a critical percentage of a population loses faith in its institutions.
He should've been locked up on January 7th. That was the death knell.
How do we know there's any plan to accomplish this, and that this isn't just funneling $25M to a family member?
it’s over
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.
So the police state has upgraded from papers to eyeballs
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
Ryan Ballard strikes again.