Immigrants are only the first target of a rapidly expanding digital dragnet that can track our individual movements. President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and military against protesters in Los Angeles is widely being interpreted as a display of intimidation and state power ahead of his birthday, when Trump will oversee a military parade in Washington, D.C. in the style of a dictator. The president has warned that protesters in D.C. will be “met with very heavy force.” Democrats and civil rights groups say the president is inflaming tensions to justify further repression, crossing the line into blatant authoritarianism as demonstrations against his administration spread across the country. However, perhaps the greatest consolidation of state power is not happening in the streets, but quietly being hammered out in courtrooms and behind closed doors, where Trump’s campaign of mass deportation is being used to justify a rapid expansion and centralization of the surveillance state. “The idea that this is something that just affects immigrants is wholly untrue,” said Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst and digital rights watchdog at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an interview with Truthout. “I think immigrants are the first target; it is a permission structure, and if they can get away with doing these things to immigrants, what are the legal barriers from moving on to the next undesirable group?” This reality became brutally apparent on June 8 as law enforcement attempted to quell a protest through intimidation in downtown Los Angeles. A booming voice from a police helicopter hovering above the crowd announced, “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.” As Truthout has reported, law enforcement across the country have embraced facial recognition technology despite numerous studies showing such software is racist and results in false arrests. Pro-Israel extremists used facial recognition to dox campus activists during protests against the genocide in Gaza, including international students targeted by the Trump administration for deportation.
via truthout: Trump Is Rapidly Expanding the Surveillance State as Protests Grow