David Walace-Wells writes in NYT: ‘But while it is a familiar warning from civil libertarians that surveillance tools introduced in one narrow context will quickly be deployed in other, more worrying ways, immigration agents appear already to have made that jump, turning their apps on citizens who aren’t doing anything illegal beyond expressing hostility to the vision of state power (…) embodied by its mostly masked immigration enforcement army.’

And: ‘But Homan, Trump, his adviser Stephen Miller and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, haven’t conjured a new surveillance state out of whole cloth. We are now several decades into the militarization of American law enforcement and the expansion of the homeland security mandate, which have together yielded an unnerving mix of imperial impunity and national-security-style policing that the historian Nikhil Pal Singh has called a new form of “homeland empire.”’

China is almost here, with different kinds of Uyghurs.

(a sf 2048)