This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to cancel the visas of college students who protest in support of Palestine, opening the path to their deportation. A small company called Stellar Defense & Cyber Intelligence is ready to help by deploying AI technology to identify anonymous, masked pro-Palestinian protestors, through a campaign it refers to as “Operation Wrath of Zion.”
Stellar is the maker of NesherAI, a bespoke facial-recognition tool which it claims is capable of deanonymizing pro-Palestinian protestors. The name “Nesher” is Hebrew for “eagle,” the symbol for both NesherAI and the Terror Watch Agency, the brand under which it operates. Their slogan on social media is, “The Eagle listens, The Eagle watches, The Eagle knows.”
In December, The Times of Israel reported that Betar had worked with pro-Israel U.S. lawmakers including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Fetterman (D-PA) on plans to round up “suspects” in anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Ross Glick, the executive director of Betar US, told the paper the purpose of Betar’s use of facial recognition was to “give the Trump team a head start.” While Glick stressed that Betar supports free speech, he added that “if a foreign student is here on a visa, they don’t have the same rights as others to protest or promote anti-Zionist narratives.”
On Wednesday, Betar did just as Glick said. “Join us at the jihad rally as we assist @ICEgov in deportation efforts,” the U.S. branch of Betar posted on the social media platform X. Hawila’s Terror Watch Agency reposted Betar’s statement.
A small company called Stellar Defense & Cyber Intelligence is ready to help by deploying AI technology to identify anonymous, masked pro-Palestinian protestors
And now you know why privacy was important and Big Tech was a threat to democracy. Those of us who know history saw the danger coming, have been warning people right and left and been called crackpots for a quarter century.
And now that democracy is living its final days in America, it’s happening.
And now it’s too late.
Welcome to the dystopian future you complacently let yourself get trapped into.
When 77 million people do the thing, you can’t really blame it on character. At that point it’s a failure of the species. Don’t worry, we won’t be plaguing the world for too much longer.
I didn’t know white settlers were “the species”.
You think political illiteracy is an epidemic only of white European descendants?
You’re saying the species as a whole failed because 77 million people voted for a fascist. Thats a minority WITHIN THE US, a minority which was empowered by an undemocratic superstructure, when they were given a choice between a fascist and a fascist with a coexist sticker on top.
The global majority isn’t as ignorant as the US/Europeans and that fact is shown because left to their own devices, without intervention from your genocidal ass governments, leftist movements pop up time and time again.
If you wanna wallow in your nihilism and self pity, knock yourselves out, but keep the rest of us out of it. It’s not a failure on our part that you and others like you capitulate to fascists (dressing it up as a tragic inevitability in which you bear no responsibility) at the slightest gust of wind.
No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.
Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.
Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.
We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.
77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.
Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.
“Join us at the jihad rally as we assist @ICEgov in deportation efforts,”
They really don’t even see the problem do they.
Operation Proving The Haters Right.
And so it begins…
Surely they are still protected by the first amendment. Not that Trump cares.
“Fair Use” in media and on the internet is not a legal protection, it is a defense in court. Most cases never go to court over fair use, because the billion/trillion dollar company targeting you can afford to wait you out.
Our whole legal framework has degraded to this level, I fear. They would have to defend it I think court for it to matter - and what are the chances a college aged kid can afford to.
There are rights groups that used to be a help in these matters, but if everyone everywhere is under attack, they certainly don’t have the resources to deal with everything.
What does any of this have to do with fair use?
I’m saying that he is treating all of our existing laws as guidelines that you’ll have to sue him in order to reverse. Almost as if our laws matter only if you bring him to court to defend them.
Our congress is not balancing him. No formal objection or interference as far as I know, raising their own bills with horrifying implications in the meantime. But maybe it’s an optimistic view, I think maybe corporations and rights groups and foreign countries, and wronged individuals are going to be up his ass for four years. It’s the only way we can expect the judicial branch to check the lunacy.
This timeline is just ridonkadonk
