18 ms·

DHS Quietly Testing Mandatory Facial Recognition of Passengers Exiting U.S

145 points by tsaoutourpants 10y ago

mtdewcmu 10y ago
The "green light" part made it sound more like a retinal scan (because the inside of your eyeball is dark and needs to be illuminated).
- therobot24 10y ago
  retinal scan is way too invasive to be deployed at this point - iris or face is most likely
  - tsaoutourpants 10y ago
    If you think about it, there's an argument to be made that face scanning is the most invasive because it can easily be done at a distance without your knowledge. The depths of your eyes may feel more personal, but facial recognition is insidious. Another reason I'm nearly certain this was face recognition is that DHS already has a database of faces -- your passport photos -- and thus they have something to compare to. They don't have an iris or retina database for U.S. citizens.
    - gcr 10y ago
      There's "invasive" in terms of "ability to identify you, times ease of capture." Irises (and maybe faces) are very invasive by this metric. Or there's "invasive" in terms of how much cooperation it requires to match you. I think that's what parent meant. A biopsy DNA sample or interrogation would be most invasive, followed by maybe something like a cheek swab, then palmprint, then willing fingerprint (ignoring latent fingerprints), then iris, then faces being the least invasive.
  - gcr 10y ago
    (Edit: I made the classic mistake of confusing iris with retina. Sorry. I assumed you're talking about iris recognition here.) Not invasive at all. SRI's "Iris On-the-Move" product is a gateway that people walk through; a long-range infrared camera images their iris as they're passing through. As long as you catch a glimpse of the green light as you're walking, they can match your iris template. See "Iris on the Move: Acquisition of Images for Iris Recognition in Less Constrained Environments", Matey et al 2006. (I'm trying to vaccinate you from this idea, not convince you. I obviously hate the idea of iris scanners at airports. My point is that unfortunately it can be done, and we should be careful.)
    - 2_listerine_pls 10y ago
      retina != iris
- tsaoutourpants 10y ago
  If you've ever entered the country over the last couple years and used one of the kiosks at many airports, they're the same thing. They compare your passport to the image the device takes (and give you expedited clearance if there's a match and no red flags), and IIRC, they have a green light. Facial recognition needs illumination too (edit: but obviously, invisible illumination such as IR would do just fine).
gydfi 10y ago
But, so-called “exit controls,” where documents are checked as travelers are leaving the country, were popularized last century by Nazi Germany as a great way to ensure that they could control, round up, and exterminate the Jews and other “undesirables.” It can obviously serve no purpose of keeping terrorists out, because it only affects those who are already in. Or to put it another way, they're standard in practically every country apart from the US. Because what's the point of issuing someone with a fixed-term visa if you have no record of whether they left at the end of it?
- Glyptodon 10y ago
  Then why make everybody get scanned (including US persons)? Or am I misunderstanding?
  - tsaoutourpants 10y ago
    Comrade, you ask too many questions. Perhaps we need to send you to re-education...
- klipt 10y ago
  > no record of whether they left at the end of it? There already is a record, it's called the I-94. Used to be a paper thing you handed to the airline when leaving the US, now it's all recorded electronically.
  - clubm8 10y ago
    I think that only applies to air crossings.
    - tehwebguy 10y ago
      So does the CBP scan being discussed
      - gydfi 10y ago
Animats 10y ago
This is part of the effort to detect visa overstayers. CBP tries to measure this.[1] As of the end of 2015, they estimate that there are 416,500 people in the US who overstayed their visa. They want to use the same identification techniques at entry and exit and match them. This tells them who's entered the US legally but now needs to be found and deported. [1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015%20DHS%20Entry%20and%20Exit%20Overstay%20Report.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015...
- tsaoutourpants 10y ago
  But why do we want to identify visa overstayers who are leaving the country? That doesn't do us any good. You could argue that we're doing it to prohibit them from re-entering, but the vast majority of our illegal immigration are people who come here with no intention of leaving and thus will never be found on a jet bridge. Likewise, it obviously won't do much for terrorism prevention, because those people tend to leave the country contemporaneously with leaving the earth. It seems to me that there are far more compelling reasons to implement exit controls if you have other, less savory motives.
  - larrysalibra 10y ago
    It is with the hope that the penalties from getting caught will encourage people to comply with the limit of stay terms of their visa. I've lived outside of the USA for most of my adult life and from the people I've interacted with, anecdotally, the threat that if they overstay their visa they'll be fined <insert large number here> per day and be denied a visa & entry in the future seems to motivate people to comply with the terms of their visa.
    - tsaoutourpants 10y ago
      Sure, but when you threaten fines against Jose from Guatemala who walked into this country with nothing more than what he carried on his back, and has been working a minimum wage job here for the last 10 years trying to support a family... you're accomplishing nothing. The bottom line is that if you have money, you can get yourself a valid visa, and if you don't, a fine won't exactly be effective.
gcr 10y ago
This is awful! Even ignoring the obvious moral problems with this, I don't think such a system could be as accurate as hoped. All the publically available face training datasets contain mostly US demographics (read: white people), and it's unclear how the system performance will be when applied to a data distribution that's dissimilar from the training distribution (read: nonwhite faces). I'm not aware of a lot of research about this. Even if such a system could be built with 99% accuracy, there are hundreds of thousands of people that pass through international flights every day. For every false positive, your security people have to go through all of the steps. How many innocent folks will confuse the scanner and be taken into custody for false positives? This is just a tool for oppression. Nothing more. (See Part 1 of Scheirer and Boult's tutorial slides at IJCB 2011, "Biometrics: Practical Issues in Privacy and Security," for a great high-level overview of these kinds of issues: http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securics.com/~walter/IJCB2011/IJCB11-tutorial-part1.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securic... In particular, the slides starting on page 19 have more about this kind of analysis)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Pretty sure this kind of capability exists on the highways as well, particularly between heavy trafficking corridors like Philly to Montreal. IIRC, there was a NY Times article a few years ago (which I cannot find) that mentioned that it started with LPR cameras, but was capable of capturing faces as well.
- gshulegaard 10y ago
  Personally, I think talking about false positive and accuracy is a straw man problem. The much more difficult question (or not difficult question depending on who you ask) is whether a system like this should exist even if it has perfect accuracy. At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening? That is the real question and unfortunately it's not one that can be grounded empirically (at least as far as I have seen). One thing is for sure: we have been headed down a dangerous road for awhile. Washington seemingly wants to go down it seeing as Presidents from both sides of the aisle have only rolled us further down this road. Edit: I used Washington here because I am a US citizen, but I think it worth pointing out that other developed nations have been going this way as well (e.g. the UK).
Havoc 10y ago
Hard at work manufacturing that freedom as always.
r00fus 10y ago
Hate to say I told ya so, but [1]. Anyone who has any doubt as to the way this country is headed, should really read 1984 for a preview of what's coming. All that will take to make this full-blown is some metastasizing event (see 9/11) that will take us from slipping down the slope directly to falling into the abyss. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601878
- pjungwir 10y ago
  When I think of things like mass surveillance, proliferation of felonies, over-charging & plea bargaining, civil asset forfeiture, and police militarization, the book I really think of is not 1984, but Hannah Arendt's Totalitarianism. I think it is very thought-provoking and helps show what it means to lose the rule of law in your country. Also unlike 1984 it is about things that actually happened. And just to be clear, I think these fears are non-partisan. The problems didn't start in January, but much sooner. Solving them isn't as easy as just electing the right party.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    I question whether elections will be a concern for those in power soon.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I agree with you, yet I wonder how many here who also agree put their money where their mouth is? If we're all still living here and investing here, we'll just be like any other group of intelligent people who will have seen the broad strokes coming, but are still caught by surprise.
- uxp100 10y ago
  Hate to say I told ya so implies that you are linking to some prediction about exit tracking, or facial recognition in airports. Your post you link is about your prediction that Social Media account credentials will be required to be handed over by citizens on exit. That's not a complete non sequitur, but hold your horses, you have made a verifiable claim, and it isn't true yet. You haven't "told" us anything.
coldcode 10y ago
The next step is mandatory facial recognition of everyone in the U.S. What better way to track all of those visitors who come into the country and where they go than to track everyone everywhere all the time. License plates are already recorded almost everywhere. The location of your cell phone clearly has to be known by the carrier, it's a simple database dump to track your phone. Track everything you do online by tapping databases from Facebook and Google (as best you can since they probably don't want you to). Track all of your credit card, stock and other purchases. Correlate all of these data points together, and imagine the possibilities. Of course it's not 100% accurate, but for nearly 400 Million people (citizens, illegals and visitors) what's a few tens of millions of inaccurate data points.
trustfundbaby 10y ago
The thinking behind this isn't complicated. The US wants to construct a database of people who visit the US, and using it on people leaving the US will probably encounter less resistance than people entering the US, as well as have people who don't travel much going "whats the big deal anyway?" Now they have your face and personal data, and they can probably run that against all the surveillance information being collected daily by the NSA etc. From a privacy perspective (what happens if theres some sort of mistake, and you're not a citizen), this is F*g terrible, but that's what happens when you get a populace inured to surveillance in the first place. I don't see this ending up anyplace good.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  Heck, there are lots of ways this could screw up a citizen like me. I don't live in the US. I'm only going to be there for visits at the most, and at this point I'm holding out. I'm too afraid that one day, I won't be able to leave for whatever reason. This doesn't help that. My non-American spouse refuses to travel there again. Even being late catching a flight could make things rather inconvenient.
- astrodust 10y ago
  I'm less concerned about privacy, although still concerned about that, than I am about the Brazil principle here. The sorts of people that end up in these border security jobs are, if nothing else, very good at "following orders" and if the computer says someone's a target who are they to think otherwise? Will they arrest a five year old child with the same name as someone who's identified as a terrorist mastermind wanted for bombings in the 1980s? I'd bet money they would! Will someone be arrested for looking like Osama Bin Ladin because for some reason he's still in the database? Undoubtedly. They'll be rounding up people that simply look like other people, or by people mis-identified due to software bugs or broken, badly implemented features. What if all people who have really dark skin are classified as an immediate threat because of a single entry in the database that caused the identifier to over-fit for a particular set of inputs? The failure rate on this is bound to be high. Even a 99.9% accurate system is going to identify nearly a million people as threats if there's 900 million trips per year, which is a typical year in the US. If it's 99.8% or 99.5% the numbers grow to the level of pure absurdity.
tinus_hn 10y ago
Why is this a problem? Because it looks creepy?
- tsaoutourpants 10y ago
  You could try reading the rest of the thread, as several users have broke it down for you.
_audakel 10y ago
There seems to be alot of ppl not sure as to why / what purpose scanning ppl on exit would acomplish. To me it makes the most sense that this would be an easy first step to start working out errors in the machines and get training data in a way that is not likely to cause the electorate to get upset. In the future once it is working then then can start moving it more inwards facing.
a97272 10y ago
Direction to implement this was in the executive order Trump signed which banned people from the 7 countries that the Obama administration had built a database of nationals of those countries. When I read the executive order I was quite troubled to see this. I also noticed the exit tracking part of the order went undiscussed in the media. I searched to see if anyone else had noticed but i didn't find anyone else talking about it. It almost feels like some of the more outrageous parts of the order (eg ignoring green card holders) were designed to draw attention away from the real point: slipping in exit tracking without people noticing (because they are too busy distracted fighting the other parts of the order).
EGreg 10y ago
Just a question - wouldn't this actually help prevent criminals from fleeing the country with fake passports?
- TillE 10y ago
  When's the last time that actually happened in the US? A passport isn't just a document anymore, it's an entry in a database. Hard to fake.
- yaur 10y ago
  Personally if I was going to "flee the country" and was worried about DHS I would just paddle across the St Lawrence river and report to CanBSA as required. Exit visas aren't a thing and there is no requirement AFAIK to report that you are leaving.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cavisne 10y ago
America is the only country I've been to which doesnt check people on the way out...
beezischillin 10y ago
I can understand how this is an issue, however I kind of take issue in the way the article is written: starting with comparing the US to Nazi Germany and then escalating it to equate this with the Holocaust. Only then quietly noting that "they remain popular in Europe, Russia, and China." Kind of polarising from the get-go.

145 points by tsaoutourpants 10y ago

The "green light" part made it sound more like a retinal scan (because the inside of your eyeball is dark and needs to be illuminated).

therobot24 10y ago
retinal scan is way too invasive to be deployed at this point - iris or face is most likely
- tsaoutourpants 10y ago
  If you think about it, there's an argument to be made that face scanning is the most invasive because it can easily be done at a distance without your knowledge. The depths of your eyes may feel more personal, but facial recognition is insidious. Another reason I'm nearly certain this was face recognition is that DHS already has a database of faces -- your passport photos -- and thus they have something to compare to. They don't have an iris or retina database for U.S. citizens.
  - gcr 10y ago
    There's "invasive" in terms of "ability to identify you, times ease of capture." Irises (and maybe faces) are very invasive by this metric. Or there's "invasive" in terms of how much cooperation it requires to match you. I think that's what parent meant. A biopsy DNA sample or interrogation would be most invasive, followed by maybe something like a cheek swab, then palmprint, then willing fingerprint (ignoring latent fingerprints), then iris, then faces being the least invasive.
- gcr 10y ago
  (Edit: I made the classic mistake of confusing iris with retina. Sorry. I assumed you're talking about iris recognition here.) Not invasive at all. SRI's "Iris On-the-Move" product is a gateway that people walk through; a long-range infrared camera images their iris as they're passing through. As long as you catch a glimpse of the green light as you're walking, they can match your iris template. See "Iris on the Move: Acquisition of Images for Iris Recognition in Less Constrained Environments", Matey et al 2006. (I'm trying to vaccinate you from this idea, not convince you. I obviously hate the idea of iris scanners at airports. My point is that unfortunately it can be done, and we should be careful.)
  - 2_listerine_pls 10y ago
    retina != iris
tsaoutourpants 10y ago
If you've ever entered the country over the last couple years and used one of the kiosks at many airports, they're the same thing. They compare your passport to the image the device takes (and give you expedited clearance if there's a match and no red flags), and IIRC, they have a green light. Facial recognition needs illumination too (edit: but obviously, invisible illumination such as IR would do just fine).

gydfi 10y ago

But, so-called “exit controls,” where documents are checked as travelers are leaving the country, were popularized last century by Nazi Germany as a great way to ensure that they could control, round up, and exterminate the Jews and other “undesirables.” It can obviously serve no purpose of keeping terrorists out, because it only affects those who are already in. Or to put it another way, they're standard in practically every country apart from the US. Because what's the point of issuing someone with a fixed-term visa if you have no record of whether they left at the end of it?

Glyptodon 10y ago
Then why make everybody get scanned (including US persons)? Or am I misunderstanding?
- tsaoutourpants 10y ago
  Comrade, you ask too many questions. Perhaps we need to send you to re-education...
klipt 10y ago
> no record of whether they left at the end of it? There already is a record, it's called the I-94. Used to be a paper thing you handed to the airline when leaving the US, now it's all recorded electronically.
- clubm8 10y ago
  I think that only applies to air crossings.
  - tehwebguy 10y ago
    So does the CBP scan being discussed
    - gydfi 10y ago

Animats 10y ago

This is part of the effort to detect visa overstayers. CBP tries to measure this.[1] As of the end of 2015, they estimate that there are 416,500 people in the US who overstayed their visa. They want to use the same identification techniques at entry and exit and match them. This tells them who's entered the US legally but now needs to be found and deported. [1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015%20DHS%20Entry%20and%20Exit%20Overstay%20Report.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015...

tsaoutourpants 10y ago
But why do we want to identify visa overstayers who are leaving the country? That doesn't do us any good. You could argue that we're doing it to prohibit them from re-entering, but the vast majority of our illegal immigration are people who come here with no intention of leaving and thus will never be found on a jet bridge. Likewise, it obviously won't do much for terrorism prevention, because those people tend to leave the country contemporaneously with leaving the earth. It seems to me that there are far more compelling reasons to implement exit controls if you have other, less savory motives.
- larrysalibra 10y ago
  It is with the hope that the penalties from getting caught will encourage people to comply with the limit of stay terms of their visa. I've lived outside of the USA for most of my adult life and from the people I've interacted with, anecdotally, the threat that if they overstay their visa they'll be fined <insert large number here> per day and be denied a visa & entry in the future seems to motivate people to comply with the terms of their visa.
  - tsaoutourpants 10y ago
    Sure, but when you threaten fines against Jose from Guatemala who walked into this country with nothing more than what he carried on his back, and has been working a minimum wage job here for the last 10 years trying to support a family... you're accomplishing nothing. The bottom line is that if you have money, you can get yourself a valid visa, and if you don't, a fine won't exactly be effective.

gcr 10y ago

This is awful! Even ignoring the obvious moral problems with this, I don't think such a system could be as accurate as hoped. All the publically available face training datasets contain mostly US demographics (read: white people), and it's unclear how the system performance will be when applied to a data distribution that's dissimilar from the training distribution (read: nonwhite faces). I'm not aware of a lot of research about this. Even if such a system could be built with 99% accuracy, there are hundreds of thousands of people that pass through international flights every day. For every false positive, your security people have to go through all of the steps. How many innocent folks will confuse the scanner and be taken into custody for false positives? This is just a tool for oppression. Nothing more. (See Part 1 of Scheirer and Boult's tutorial slides at IJCB 2011, "Biometrics: Practical Issues in Privacy and Security," for a great high-level overview of these kinds of issues: http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securics.com/~walter/IJCB2011/IJCB11-tutorial-part1.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securic... In particular, the slides starting on page 19 have more about this kind of analysis)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 10y ago
Pretty sure this kind of capability exists on the highways as well, particularly between heavy trafficking corridors like Philly to Montreal. IIRC, there was a NY Times article a few years ago (which I cannot find) that mentioned that it started with LPR cameras, but was capable of capturing faces as well.
gshulegaard 10y ago
Personally, I think talking about false positive and accuracy is a straw man problem. The much more difficult question (or not difficult question depending on who you ask) is whether a system like this should exist even if it has perfect accuracy. At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening? That is the real question and unfortunately it's not one that can be grounded empirically (at least as far as I have seen). One thing is for sure: we have been headed down a dangerous road for awhile. Washington seemingly wants to go down it seeing as Presidents from both sides of the aisle have only rolled us further down this road. Edit: I used Washington here because I am a US citizen, but I think it worth pointing out that other developed nations have been going this way as well (e.g. the UK).

Havoc 10y ago

Hard at work manufacturing that freedom as always.

r00fus 10y ago

Hate to say I told ya so, but [1]. Anyone who has any doubt as to the way this country is headed, should really read 1984 for a preview of what's coming. All that will take to make this full-blown is some metastasizing event (see 9/11) that will take us from slipping down the slope directly to falling into the abyss. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601878

pjungwir 10y ago
When I think of things like mass surveillance, proliferation of felonies, over-charging & plea bargaining, civil asset forfeiture, and police militarization, the book I really think of is not 1984, but Hannah Arendt's Totalitarianism. I think it is very thought-provoking and helps show what it means to lose the rule of law in your country. Also unlike 1984 it is about things that actually happened. And just to be clear, I think these fears are non-partisan. The problems didn't start in January, but much sooner. Solving them isn't as easy as just electing the right party.
- r00fus 10y ago
  I question whether elections will be a concern for those in power soon.
M_Grey 10y ago
I agree with you, yet I wonder how many here who also agree put their money where their mouth is? If we're all still living here and investing here, we'll just be like any other group of intelligent people who will have seen the broad strokes coming, but are still caught by surprise.
uxp100 10y ago
Hate to say I told ya so implies that you are linking to some prediction about exit tracking, or facial recognition in airports. Your post you link is about your prediction that Social Media account credentials will be required to be handed over by citizens on exit. That's not a complete non sequitur, but hold your horses, you have made a verifiable claim, and it isn't true yet. You haven't "told" us anything.

coldcode 10y ago

The next step is mandatory facial recognition of everyone in the U.S. What better way to track all of those visitors who come into the country and where they go than to track everyone everywhere all the time. License plates are already recorded almost everywhere. The location of your cell phone clearly has to be known by the carrier, it's a simple database dump to track your phone. Track everything you do online by tapping databases from Facebook and Google (as best you can since they probably don't want you to). Track all of your credit card, stock and other purchases. Correlate all of these data points together, and imagine the possibilities. Of course it's not 100% accurate, but for nearly 400 Million people (citizens, illegals and visitors) what's a few tens of millions of inaccurate data points.

trustfundbaby 10y ago

The thinking behind this isn't complicated. The US wants to construct a database of people who visit the US, and using it on people leaving the US will probably encounter less resistance than people entering the US, as well as have people who don't travel much going "whats the big deal anyway?" Now they have your face and personal data, and they can probably run that against all the surveillance information being collected daily by the NSA etc. From a privacy perspective (what happens if theres some sort of mistake, and you're not a citizen), this is F*g terrible, but that's what happens when you get a populace inured to surveillance in the first place. I don't see this ending up anyplace good.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Heck, there are lots of ways this could screw up a citizen like me. I don't live in the US. I'm only going to be there for visits at the most, and at this point I'm holding out. I'm too afraid that one day, I won't be able to leave for whatever reason. This doesn't help that. My non-American spouse refuses to travel there again. Even being late catching a flight could make things rather inconvenient.
astrodust 10y ago
I'm less concerned about privacy, although still concerned about that, than I am about the Brazil principle here. The sorts of people that end up in these border security jobs are, if nothing else, very good at "following orders" and if the computer says someone's a target who are they to think otherwise? Will they arrest a five year old child with the same name as someone who's identified as a terrorist mastermind wanted for bombings in the 1980s? I'd bet money they would! Will someone be arrested for looking like Osama Bin Ladin because for some reason he's still in the database? Undoubtedly. They'll be rounding up people that simply look like other people, or by people mis-identified due to software bugs or broken, badly implemented features. What if all people who have really dark skin are classified as an immediate threat because of a single entry in the database that caused the identifier to over-fit for a particular set of inputs? The failure rate on this is bound to be high. Even a 99.9% accurate system is going to identify nearly a million people as threats if there's 900 million trips per year, which is a typical year in the US. If it's 99.8% or 99.5% the numbers grow to the level of pure absurdity.

tinus_hn 10y ago

Why is this a problem? Because it looks creepy?

tsaoutourpants 10y ago
You could try reading the rest of the thread, as several users have broke it down for you.

_audakel 10y ago

There seems to be alot of ppl not sure as to why / what purpose scanning ppl on exit would acomplish. To me it makes the most sense that this would be an easy first step to start working out errors in the machines and get training data in a way that is not likely to cause the electorate to get upset. In the future once it is working then then can start moving it more inwards facing.

a97272 10y ago

Direction to implement this was in the executive order Trump signed which banned people from the 7 countries that the Obama administration had built a database of nationals of those countries. When I read the executive order I was quite troubled to see this. I also noticed the exit tracking part of the order went undiscussed in the media. I searched to see if anyone else had noticed but i didn't find anyone else talking about it. It almost feels like some of the more outrageous parts of the order (eg ignoring green card holders) were designed to draw attention away from the real point: slipping in exit tracking without people noticing (because they are too busy distracted fighting the other parts of the order).

EGreg 10y ago

Just a question - wouldn't this actually help prevent criminals from fleeing the country with fake passports?

TillE 10y ago
When's the last time that actually happened in the US? A passport isn't just a document anymore, it's an entry in a database. Hard to fake.
yaur 10y ago
Personally if I was going to "flee the country" and was worried about DHS I would just paddle across the St Lawrence river and report to CanBSA as required. Exit visas aren't a thing and there is no requirement AFAIK to report that you are leaving.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cavisne 10y ago

America is the only country I've been to which doesnt check people on the way out...

beezischillin 10y ago

I can understand how this is an issue, however I kind of take issue in the way the article is written: starting with comparing the US to Nazi Germany and then escalating it to equate this with the Holocaust. Only then quietly noting that "they remain popular in Europe, Russia, and China." Kind of polarising from the get-go.