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Even if they ban you for a reason, you're screwed. Granted, the ban may have been warranted, but you're essentially put into a societal prison with no due proce

• tomaskafka 1y ago
  That is a great analogy. There are countries where a police can throw you into a lifetime jail with zero option for justice unless you are a famous person from a well known western country. Those countries are North Korea, Iran, Russia, Google and Apple.
  • mothballed 1y ago
    Well the US can do it with CBP/ICE, but not for life. I was placed in a jail without being arrested or being accused of a crime and they were very clear at all times I was not even arrested, nor did a federal criminal history search show any record of arrest. No access to lawyer either. US Citizen. Contacted lawyers, all informed me they'd given up trying to sue for these things because it's hopeless.
    • baq 1y ago
      Founding fathers rolling in their graves.
    • shawabawa3 1y ago
      how long were you in jail? How did you get out?
      • mothballed 1y ago
        ~12 hours in jail, a few hours shackled in prisoner transport vans, and then ~12 hours in cuffs at a couple different hospitals hospital (where I was touched by health care professionals without my consent and without a warrant) while they waited for signs of non-existent "drugs." Shortly before I was released they served me retroactive search warrant, signed by a judge after it happened, using made-up PC that did not even state the name of the person or animal they claim prompted it. I was released after an HSI guy showed up, took a quick look at me, decided I wasn't a terrorist or whatever, served me the retroactive warrant, and then I was sent on a prisoner transport van to be dumped at the border with my all my shit (including my shoelaces) in a plastic bag. For the hospital part I was sent a ~$1k bill, which is still in collections.
        • dingnuts 1y ago
          if you're telling a real story and not just AI generating bullshit for karma you should go to the PRESS. this story, if it's real, should be something the press would eat up. screw the lawyers. go public and name names
          • deleted 1y ago
            [deleted]
          • mothballed 1y ago
            The press did an almost identical story for Ashley Cervantes, who had almost the same thing happen, except she was digitally (finger) raped by doctors as part of the process and was a young barely adult ~poor woman vulnerable minority so way way more public sympathy for her vs me (I'm a middle class white native English speaking boring white boy with a hick accent so basically at the bottom of the interest at ACLU, they do occasionally feature some people that have had it happen if they have sympathetic backgrounds). Nothing changed. Same port of entry, same hospital network, same everything (I don't think she was jailed like me though). Lawsuit failed and public press did nothing. Later the ACLU won some kind of suit that forced all involved parties to be warned, which they promptly ignored, and that was the end of it. https://www.southernborder.org/woman-suing-border-patrol-over-cavity-search https://www.southernborder.org/woman-suing-border-patrol-ove... https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/woman-sues-cbp-over-body-cavity-search https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/woman-sues-cbp-over-bo...
            • philipallstar 1y ago
              > I'm a middle class white native English speaking boring white boy with a hick accent so basically at the bottom of the interest at ACLU This in itself should be shocking to us
            • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
              I looked at the final motion to dismiss document and boy did she get bad legal advice. The lawyer tried a Bivens case against the hospital... which any lawyer will tell you is an impossibility. Bivens cases are just about impossible to win under any circumstances, but trying to do a Bivens against a non-federal officer is a guaranteed loss. To have won this case against the agents would have required piercing qualified immunity which is very tough (you have to prove intentional misconduct... just being incompetent isn't enough in most cases). She would have been better off pursuing a medical malpractice case against the hospital and/or doctor to be able to get any kind of relief.
    • hungmung 1y ago
      Assuming what you're saying is true, this is the kind of thing 2A was written for. I don't mean for you personally, but for society it's really the last line of defense against a rogue government. But, even if your story is totally made up it's completely believable. Scary times.
      • novok 1y ago
        Not if the supreme court wouldn't enforce it!
        • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
          The Supreme Court does not enforce laws.
      • bdangubic 1y ago
        2A might have been written hundreds of years ago but it is now an instrument to sell guns. no amount of guns you buy will help you against rogue government
        • hungmung 1y ago
          Hard disagree. Guerilla resistance has proven itself surprisingly effective against modern militaries. Multiply that by a military which would be going to war against its own citizens and you have a very uncertain situation. Yes, if the military was targeting you individually you'd almost certainly be fucked. But a guerilla resistance spread out over a continent would be very difficult to eradicate. Just look at Afghanistan.
          • petre 1y ago
            I think there are enough stories of armed religious groups raided by three letter agencies to prove otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
            • 1y ago
    • abtinf 1y ago
      You should contact IJ. They recently took up a case like this. https://ij.org/press-release/us-citizen-and-army-veteran-submits-claims-for-unconstitutional-immigration-detention/ https://ij.org/press-release/us-citizen-and-army-veteran-sub...
      • mothballed 1y ago
        Looks like the statute of limitations has ran out. I typed up a ~100 page document with very thorough records of the retroactive warrant, what happened, and medical records to try and hold at least the "medical care providers" accountable but the board determined that the medical care providers were performing a (warrantless) law enforcement search and not medical care so their license wasn't in jeapordy. Not sure how they determined this since they were in no way deputized nor were they employed by the government, and in fact I was personally being billed for it. The CBP argued the opposite, that medical care was rendered and not a search so CBP was not liable for extending the ~12 hours during which they "detained" me with no evidence. CBP argued they held me for my own safety because I could die of non-existent drugs. The challenges to this have all failed (see Ashley Cervantes, basically identical legal facts) so it seems the courts are pretty satisfied with the catch-22 of any challenges of the criminal aspect to be ruled as medical care (thus unchallengables) and then any challenge of the medical care to be ruled as a detainment for a criminal search (thus unchallengable).
  • vkou 1y ago
    The US has done just that to Abrego Garcia, and is now giving him the choice between confessing to a crime that he hasn't been convicted of (and likely didn't commit) and deportation to a country he has never been in.
    • evanjrowley 1y ago
      Abrego Garcia has attorneys working his case through the US justice system. That is a key factor that the other entities lack.
      • vkou 1y ago
        He has already been illegally disappeared to El Salvador, despite theoretically having access to a lawyer. It took a national story for him to be brought back, only to get threatened by the exact same thing. Lawyers only matter if the people with the guns think they should be bound by the law.
  • einpoklum 1y ago
    First of all - add Israel. If you're a Gazan than this goes without saying, but even if you're a citizen, then - the General Security Service can and does people into custody without a warrant; often does not publicly disclose or admit said custody; and has "secret" detention facilities to hold such people (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_1391 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_1391) I also wonder about the US: What about the secret imprisonment mechanisms it set up after the 2001 attacks on the twin towers (9/11)? Were those ever dis-established?
• fauigerzigerk 1y ago
  Very true. They are effectively a new type of non-territorial state with absolutely no separation of powers or rule of law or principle of proportionality. What makes this difficult though is that they are under constant attack from highly organised and automated criminal operations that create and exploit accounts en masse. Any solution to the tyrannical state of affairs we are subjected to (even more so as developers) needs to balance better protections for real people (including as you say for people who have committed some transgressions) with fighting organised crime.
  • mothballed 1y ago
    It's also used by the actual territorial state to project power through corporations, by influencing them to project their policies. I'm reminded of the story of the guy that had his google account shut down for "CSAM" because they took explicit medical pictures of their child at the directions of physicians, that were only privately shared solely for the purpose of aiding diagnosis. Apparently google works with the government to create these systems to scan your cloud images in the background.
    • fauigerzigerk 1y ago
      Yes, I think governments love centralisation of control in very few hands. It gives them far greater powers than they would otherwise have, both technically and legally. "Harmful" content has significant overlap with freedom of speech, so governments find it hard to ban directly. But when there's a big corporation facilitating access to that content, then it becomes a clear case of "evil capitalist profiting from harmful content - corporations need to take responsibility!". When a government doesn't like end-to-end encrypted photos and cloud drives, all they have to do is issue a secret order telling Apple to disable it. And when people find workarounds for intrusive and insecure age verification methods, what's better than a total sideloading ban to regain control?
      • NotPractical 1y ago
        > governments love centralisation of control in very few hands Honestly, that was one of the things that shocked me about the Digital Markets Act in the EU. It gives them less power over their citizens, not more. (Of course, they also passed the Digital Services Act around the same time, and now they're looking at age verification and breaking E2EE, so I guess they figured they had to balance things out...)
• isaacremuant 1y ago
  Let's hope people remember this and don't cheer the precedent when it's set against "undesirable" like it was with Alex Jones. It always starts like that.
  • abustamam 1y ago
    Can you explain a bit more? As far as I was aware, Alex Jones was found guilty by a court of law. I didn't really follow his case or anything about him though. Did he get banned from Google/Apple for no reason?
    • isaacremuant 1y ago
      He was a high profile case of social media coordinated banning. Not just one platform but many and it wasn't about court orders at the time but simply the vague "policy" which we know gets applied selectively. The particularly interesting thing was that the sentiment of unpersoning someone online and "one service banning you" being a good reason for others to do so, was used by politicians later on to suggest more proactive unpersoning of different government critics which, they obviously called conspiracy theorists. Obviously different politicians call for the ban of people from opposing political parties, so it's not something about a specific party or political compass quadrant, as much as people want it to be. This was sometime after Trump's election, when the "all out war" on the US political landscape was happening. You could probably find numerous less extreme and easier to defend cases, where people get banned from one or many linked services, with no recourse but the Jones one was one of or maybe the first high profile one across several sites. It's very easy to think that these powers will only be used at someone we dislike or find politically abhorrent but it will always point back to us, the moment we are the nuisance, no matter if it's because we are against the new freedom (TM) war or "save the children" civil encroachment.
      • abustamam 1y ago
        I would argue that social media banning is much different than Google/Apple banning. If I got banned from Facebook or reddit or even HN then I'm not really missing out on much. Of course, for people who actually do business on these platforms, like Jones, then it sucks to lose a platform, but I don't think anyone has a fundamental right to post whatever they want on these platforms. If I got banned from Google, then almost 20 years of emails, 1TB of files on Google Drive, are gone. Many of the services I use that use email as a second factor, I'd be locked out of. (And before you ask, yes, I use an authenticator whenever I can, but for some reason some services decide to still only let me use email as a second factor). If I forgot my password at any site, can't reset it. Not to mention that I can't use my Android phone out of the box without installing custom de-Googled firmware. I suppose the same argument could be made that I don't have a fundamental right to use Gmails mail servers, but as I pointed out above, it is more than just an inconvenience, it could actively be harmful to my digital life, because Google has its hands on almost all things digital.
• FollowingTheDao 1y ago
  Yes, I am feeling like technology is being used as a authoritarian trap.
  • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    Always has been... pertinent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
    • willywanker 1y ago
      IBM in Nazi Germany was no different from other German owned companies in being conscripted to do what the Third Reich ordered them to; the headquarters in the US obviously had no control over them during WW2. Plus it's ridiculous to apply collective guilt in any form by blaming later IBM management, given that anyone involved with 1940s German IBM is long dead by now.
      • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
        The original post is about technology being used for authoritarian purposes. I used Dehomag (IBMs German subsidiary) as an example of how technology has been used to support that supposition as a historical example (I could have picked many). Your post does not repudiate the parent post, nor my post.