Screenshot without paywall: https://archive.is/rwThF
Under the Trump administration, multiple US government agencies are using AI and other tools to broadly track the social media of tourists and immigrants – and potentially to watch US citizens as well
It appears that the US federal government is investing more public funds in such tech tools, says Paromita Shah at Just Futures Law, an immigration advocacy non-profit in Washington DC. “We’re witnessing a real-time expansion of the use of social media monitoring technologies,” says Shah. “When you use social media monitoring to intimidate, harass, alienate, deport, incarcerate, arrest – when that becomes your standard to do those things – it’s antithetical to a lot of what democracy stands for.”
People who make claims like this forget that nothing is protected by the constitution. The constitution is just a piece of paper. Rights are protected only by enforcement of the constitution and if nobody is willing to enforce it then the rights in there are completely worthless.
Protected by the rule of law maybe a better way to express it. The current holder of the office of President is destroyer of the rule of law.
My point was mostly aimed at the people who view the constitution and constitutional rights as some quasi-mystical concept, similar to the one underpinning stupid phrasings like “natural rights” or “god-given rights” that also ignore that rights only exist because we, as human societies, decided to put effort into creating and enforcing them.
This seems to be more common in the US along with the quasi-mystical view of the founding fathers, the office of the president and the supreme court among other things. Possibly because a lot of those things have been around for too long for people to remember a time before they existed.