>The Taliban has previously shown it’s capable and willing to harness the vast data piles we create every day to try and filter out people it believes are detri

>The Taliban has previously shown it’s capable and willing to harness the vast data piles we create every day to try and filter out people it believes are detrimental to its way of life, including official government databases. In 2016, Taliban insurgents killed 12 passengers on a bus they stopped after requiring everyone to scan their fingerprints on a biometric machine that cross-checked a database of security force workers, according to an Afghan army commander. “Most of the passengers were not familiar with the machine but we knew it was a biometric device that could identify security force members from amongst civilians,” the commander told Afghan news website TOLOnews at the time. That is a pretty deep penetration of the former regime which is also evidenced by the speed of the power transfer. Not that it is a surprise in general for anybody who paid attention, and the end game was clear, yet the actual forest-fire like speed is still very impressive - for example the pro-Soviet puppet regime back then fought for 3 years after the Soviet forces had left before finally falling.