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the revelation that thousands of agents have access to a searchable database without public oversight is a new development in what privacy advocates and some lawmakers warn could be an infringement of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

CBP officials declined, however, to answer questions about how many Americans’ phone records are in the database, how many searches have been run or how long the practice has gone on, saying it has made no additional statistics available “due to law enforcement sensitivities and national security implications.”

Law enforcement agencies must show probable cause and persuade a judge to approve a search warrant before searching Americans’ phones. But courts have long granted an exception to border authorities, allowing them to search people’s devices without a warrant or suspicion of a crime.

The CBP directive gives officers the authority to look and scroll through any traveler’s device using what’s known as a “basic search,” and any traveler who refuses to unlock their phone for this process can have it confiscated for up to five days.

CBP officials give travelers a printed document saying that the searches are “mandatory,” but the document does not mention that data can be retained for 15 years and that thousands of officials will have access to it.

Officers are also not required to give the document to travelers before the search, meaning that some travelers may not fully understand their rights to refuse the search until after they’ve handed over their phones

And for the record, I've never understood why a writer who recognizes technology is labeled a "sci-fi writer", as if being a "sci-fi writer" were equal to being some sort of substandard, second-rate hack. The great Kurt Vonnegut managed to get stuck in that drawer after he recognized technolgy in his 1st novel "Player Piano". No matter that he turned out to be (imo) one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, perio

it's chilling how prescient he was about modern media culture in Fahrenheit 451. It's not a Luddite screed against TV. It's a speculative piece on what happens when we become divorced from the past and more attuned to images on the screen than we are to each other.

ite author of mine since I was in elementary school way back when mammoths roamed the earth. To me, he was an ardent enthusiast of technology, but also recognized its potential for seperating us from one another while at the same time seemingly making us more "connected" in a superficial and transitory way

Bradbury is undeniably skeptical of technology and the risks it brings, particularly the risk that what we'd now call "virtualization" will replace actual emotional, intellectual or physical experience. On the other hand, however, I don't think there's anybody who rhapsodizes about the imaginative possibilities of rocketships and robots the way Bradbury does, and he's built entire setpieces around the idea of technological wonders creating new experiences.    I'm not saying he doesn't have a Luddite streak, more that he has feet in both camps and is harder to pin down than a single label allows. And I'll also add that in his public pronouncements of late, the Luddite streak has come out more strongly--but I tend to put much of that down to the curmudgeonliness of a ninety-year-old man.

I don't think he is a luddite so much as he is the little voice that whispers "be careful what you wish for." We have been sold the beautiful myth that technology will buy us free time, but we are busier than ever. TV was supposed to enlighten the masses, instead we have "reality TV" and a news network that does not let facts get in the way of its ideological agenda. We romanticize childhood, ignoring children's aggressive impulses, then feed them on a steady diet of violent video games.  

The complex and its buildings vaguely recall a Southwest landmark frequently mistaken for the city of the future: Arcosanti, the architect Paolo Soleri’s 1970 “urban laboratory” nestled in the mountains north of Phoenix. It’s oddly fitting: Soleri imagined a sustainable desert utopia, as well as speculative space “arcologies”—self-sustaining architectural ecologies, delicately rendered as hypothetical asteroid-belt cities or prototype ships

The only spacecraft we see on the tour is a model of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, glimpsed from a distance in an otherwise empty hangar. Even the spacecraft isn’t real.

the name Spaceport America suggests theatrics. There are several commercial spaceports throughout the United States, some of which sport more activity and tenants. Most of Virgin Galactic’s testing has happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port; Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport recently signed on the SpaceX competitor Vector as a customer.Others, like Oklahoma’s Air and Space Port, seem to be even more like ghost towns than this one. But New Mexico’s gambit suggests we are at the spaceport of the nation. It doesn’t feel like the frontier of private space travel so much as a movie set.

Many promises for technologies of future urbanism start as desert prototypes

New Mexico examples tend to include slightly more dystopian rehearsals: Much of the state’s existing science and defense industries emerged from bringing Manhattan Project scientists to what, at the time, was the middle of nowhere to test nuclear weapons—essentially, to practice ending the world.

most of my fellow tourists take the premise of ubiquitous space travel to colonies on Mars as a fait accompli. I’m not sure why people in a desert would fantasize about going somewhere even harder to inhabit

Humanity dreams of going to space for many of the same reasons some people went to the desert: because it is there, because they hope to get rich extracting natural resources they find there, and because they suspect mysterious, new terrains can’t be any worse than the irredeemable wreckage of the landscape they’re leaving behind

believing in the inevitability of Mars colonies is maybe no less idealistic than believing in the Southwest itself

The romance and promise of the American West was built, in part, on federal land grants to private corporations that promised to bring boomtowns to places previously otherwise deemed uninhabitable wastelands. Cities rose and fell with the rerouting of railroads

To manifest destiny’s proponents, to doubt the inevitability of technological and social progress via the railroad was tantamount to doubting the will of God. Today, questioning the value of (mostly) privately funded space development likewise feels like doubting human progress

I wonder if the future always feels like rehearsal until it arrives, or if it is always rehearsal, only seeming like it has arrived when the run-through loses its novelty. Maybe all of the impatient skeptics will be proven wrong this year, and the future will finally arrive at Spaceport America. Here in the desert, a better future always seems to be right around the corner

Overall, Americans look at the future of science and technology with some hefty amounts of skepticism and dismay.  Health care improvements do appeal to us, unsurprisingly, given our ageing demographics.  Classic futures themes of space and travel have withered in our collective mind.  I’m reminded of Bruce Sterling’s aphorism about the rest of the 21st century: “The future is about old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.”

There are very real consequences from a white supremacist holding the highest office in the land. There are very real consequences to Trump using the bully pulpit to foster hate on the basis of almost every human characteristic, be it race, faith, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, gender, or class

The policies of the Trump administration cannot be divorced from the rhetoric of the Trump administration. The rhetoric and the policies are both driven by xenophobia, Islamaphobia, misogyny and white supremacy. And if the government is going to treat diverse and marginalized communities as subhuman so will everyone else

We have to be prepared for much worse from the Trump administration because this is what he has said that he would do all along. It is naïve and foolish of us to think that he is not going to follow through on his promises.

It is dystopic. I have met with survivors who have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. One survivor, Tanya Gersh, described to me how she rarely says hello to strangers and is not as gregarious and outgoing as she used to be. She described to me how after she was viciously trolled by white supremacists in Whitefish, Montana. There were something like 700 forms of communication such as emails, social media messages, voice mails. She told me she had to have a conversation with her ten year old about the Holocaust and how every Jewish parent struggles with when to have that conversation with their children about anti-Semitism. Hate crimes that target individuals send a community wide message that its members are not welcome. This undermines feelings of safety and security. It is  called "vicarious trauma." For example the vandalism and arson of house of worship, the targeting of organizations, student groups, campus communities or even state sponsored forms of hate are also designed to terrorize whole communities and groups of people. We also know that hate literally kills people by making communities physically and emotionally sick.

There are many victims of hate crimes who out of fear remain silent. Hate crimes are very underreported in America. The stats do not capture the scale of the problem.

The War on Terror must stop as well because I don’t think you can separate what the United States does abroad with what it does to its own people — especially nonwhites, Muslims, and other marginalized and discriminated against communities. Justice also involves archiving this moment, documenting what survivors and their communities have experienced

there is no one size fits all answer. It should ultimately be determined by the survivors. In my book there are survivors  who forgave the aggressors and culprits in open court and elsewhere because they don’t believe that prison is the answer. There are others who felt otherwise. But overwhelmingly the survivors that I met are open to reconciliation so long as there is accountability

the spread of persistent surveillance technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The border is the natural place for the government to start using them, since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of intrusive technologies there,”

the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,”

In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition software at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense

Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”

Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones

In the U.S., leading companies with border security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the borderlands. Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians

Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,”

Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in January. But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.

“Walls are not only a question of blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation

Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 percent of Border Patrol seizures at immigration enforcement checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. citizens.

the agency uses its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border enforcement

documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests

CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. “It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or obtain health care. But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants. “It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.”

Tohono O’odham people have developed common cause with other communities struggling against colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems. “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”

According to Bloomberg, Saudi officials project the Line will cost around $100-$200 billion of the $500 billion planned to be spent on Neom and will have a population of 1 million with 380,000 jobs by the year 2030. It will have one of the biggest airports in the world for some reason, which seems like a strange addition to a supposedly climate-friendly city.

The site also makes numerous hand wavy and vaguely menacing claims, including that “all businesses and communities” will have “over 90%” of their data processed by AI and robots:

Don’t pay attention to Saudi war crimes in Yemen, the prince’s brutal crackdowns on dissent, the hit squad that tortured journalist Jamal Khashoggi to death, and the other habitual human rights abuses that allow the Saudi monarchy to remain in power. Also, ignore that obstacles facing Neom include budgetary constraints, the forced eviction of tens of thousands of existing residents such as the Huwaitat tribe, coronavirus and oil shock, investor flight over human rights concerns, and the lingering questions of whether the whole project is a distraction from pressing domestic issues and/or a mirage conjured up by consulting firms pandering to the crown prince’s ego and hungry for lucrative fees. Nevermind you that there are numerous ways we could ensure the cities people already live in are prepared for climate change rather than blowing billions of dollars on a vanity project.

the risk of trusting competition to an interoperability mandate is that it will create a new ecosystem where everything that's not forbidden is mandatory, freezing in place the current situation, in which Facebook and the other giants dominate and new entrants are faced with onerous compliance burdens that make it more difficult to start a new service, and limit those new services to interoperating in ways that are carefully designed to prevent any kind of competitive challenge

Facebook is a notorious opponent of adversarial interoperability. In 2008, Facebook successfully wielded a radical legal theory that allowed it to shut down Power Ventures, a competitor that allowed Facebook's users to use multiple social networks from a single interface. Facebook argued that by allowing users to log in and display Facebook with a different interface, even after receipt of a cease and desist letter telling Power Ventures to stop, the company had broken a Reagan-era anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In other words, upsetting Facebook's investors made their conduct illegal.

Today, Facebook is viewed as holding all the cards because it has corralled everyone who might join a new service within its walled garden. But legal reforms to safeguard the right to adversarial interoperability would turn this on its head: Facebook would be the place that had conveniently organized all the people whom you might tempt to leave Facebook, and even supply you with the tools you need to target those people.

Such a tool would allow someone to use Facebook while minimizing how they are used by Facebook. For people who want to leave Facebook but whose friends, colleagues or fellow travelers are not ready to join them, a service like this could let Facebook vegans get out of the Facebook pool while still leaving a toe in its waters.

In a competitive market (which adversarial interoperability can help to bring into existence), even very large companies can't afford to enrage their customers

the audience for a legitimate adversarial interoperability product are the customers of the existing service that it connects to.

anyone using a Facebook mobile app might be exposing themselves to incredibly intrusive data-gathering, including some surprisingly creepy and underhanded tactics.

If users could use a third-party service to exchange private messages with friends, or to participate in a group they're a member of, they can avoid much (but not all) of this surveillance.

Facebook users (and even non-Facebook users) who want more privacy have a variety of options, none of them very good. Users can tweak Facebook's famously hard-to-understand privacy dashboard to lock down their accounts and bet that Facebook will honor their settings (this has not always been a good bet). Everyone can use tracker-blockers, ad-blockers and script-blockers to prevent Facebook from tracking them when they're not on Facebook, by watching how they interact with pages that have Facebook "Like" buttons and other beacons that let Facebook monitor activity elsewhere on the Internet. We're rightfully proud of our own tracker blocker, Privacy Badger, but it doesn't stop Facebook from tracking you if you have a Facebook account and you're using Facebook's service.

As Facebook's market power dwindled, so would the pressure that web publishers feel to embed Facebook trackers on their sites, so that non-Facebook users would not be as likely to be tracked as they use the Web.

Today, Facebook's scandals do not trigger mass departures from the service, and when users do leave, they tend to end up on Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook.

For users who have privacy needs -- and other needs -- beyond those the big platforms are willing to fulfill, it's important that we keep the door open to competitors (for-profit, nonprofit, hobbyist and individuals) who are willing to fill those needs.

helping Facebook's own users, or the users of any big service, to configure their experience to make their lives better should be legal and encouraged even (and especially) if it provides a path for users to either diversify their social media experience or move away entirely from the big, concentrated services. Either way, we'd be on our way to a more pluralistic, decentralized, diverse Internet