This type of thing already exists. Here is an article on Clearview AI that already does this for any photos that make it to the scrap-able internet and it's already used by police and border patrol: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-im...
Here is Timothy Snyder, once Yale professor specializing in the holocaust, explaining how an atrocity like the holocaust could have happened. If you ever asked yourself "how could something so evil have happened" you should definitely watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsKrWLf7Kg4
Likewise it is worth reading They Thought They Were Free.
It describes the mental states of denial and inevitability, the rationalization of inaction, and of realizing it's "too late." If you want the quick read you can start at "Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse." Here is an excerpt: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm
People who have have made it their lives work to study the worst kinds of history have been setting off alarms because they perceive the fires of fascism to be burning here in America right now. Here you can watch such a video (5m) on NYT of world experts on the atrocities of the past warning us: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010157022/yale-c...
> have been setting off alarms because they perceive the fires of fascism to be burning here in America right now
The problem is that people who unknowingly support it, view these warnings as just another attack, and are desensitized to such attacks. To them, this is just another attack indistinguishable from all of the previous attacks where they feel vindicated.
They perceived that one side went too far to the extreme, so they're trying counteract it, and in the process go too far in the other direction.
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Neutrality is implicit support for whoever can muster the most power, neutrality is in many ways the opposite of law and betrays an ideology where there is no objective truth. When there is no objective truth, there is nothing to be curious about. When authortarians tell you what the truth is or rob you of the data to make your own assessments, curiosity becomes an act of rebellion.
I don't think HN mods operate as conservative or liberal (although curiosity is an extremely liberal cause), but I think they will come to understand the cost of neutrality.
If anything I think they have not fully confronted the paradox of intolerance or realized that the times are different than they were in the last 30 years of internet flame wars. In the past when Godwin's law and flame wars were the rule of every forum, there weren't historians at prestigious universities who studied the holocaust/fascism warning us that fascism is happening here in America right now.
When faced with horrifying information which demands response most people will choose a strategy of denial and hoping other people will act. When people are under threat by people who don't seem accountable to the law or who are even able to punish them, most people will choose a strategy of neutrality and rationalizing that it's not them under threat.
These are mental health preserving and physical health preserving until they are not.
Nobody wants to hear that if you don't do something bad things are going to happen and nobody in power, such as mods, wants to have their power challenged or use it to threaten others in power because it is going to make them uncomfortable or their lives harder.
What you are seeing is how Nazi Germany happened. Not this specific thing, but this behavior scaled over an entire population. People with empathy and others subjected to stress enter a state of grief, and the first stages of grief are shock (disbelief) and denial (not asking questions you know the answer to because the answer is too awful to bear), people tell them they are overreacting or that they are "too political." "Protest somewhere else" is a common sentiment for anyone inconvenienced by those who feel unjustly treated, and only once they personally experience harm do they start to change their mind.
It is flagged because most people want to be comfortable, and hearing uncomfortable things in comfortable spaces is something they don't want to tolerate, even if it threatens the existence of their comfortable spaces in the long term because curiosity is not compatible with authority and authoritarianism.
The economic concept of economies of scale dictates that the more researchers there are in one location, the more efficiently they are likely able to research.
History is filled with people who dug their own graves while a person with a gun pointed at them told them to do it.
It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.
Prior to 9/11, hijackings occurred with mild frequency and the official policy was appeasement: get the plane safely landed and then negotiate with the hijackers. In any ways, 9/11 was possible due to exploiting that particular policy.
Since 9/11 there have been attempts to disrupt planes and no shortage of people willing to tackle the person responsible.
As a frequent flyer who has thought about this scenario a bit, I agree with this. And I actually think that as long as the FAs kept making their inane announcements about credit cards and so forth, most pax wouldn't even notice a takeover at the front of the plane.
You do what the person with the gun says, because you believe they'll shoot if you don't. If you believe that they will shoot and kill you regardless, following their orders is (at best) going to give you a few more agonizing minutes to live. The threat becomes meaningless.
Don't try to overpower the hijackers? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and fail? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and succeed? You live. It only takes one person to do the math and realize they are basically in a no-loss scenario.
Yes, the math is the easy part, doing is the hard part. The difference between understanding and doing is large and denial, shock, rumination, and rationalization all fuel inaction and there is often a moment in which it becomes too late.
People on death marches, in concentration camps, or other similar scenarios have the same math, and yet they get gassed or forced to dig their own graves after which they are shot and buried in them.
So yes, rationally that all makes sense and we should celebrate anyone putting themselves at risk to fight for the benefit of a larger group, but reality is different, especially if the hijackers can guarantee at least one death.
To say a hijack could never happen again is wrong. The doors are a much more reasonable explanation than the courage of men.
History also gets forgotten, such as the history of secret police or mass deportation efforts as is quite clear in this thread.
Assuming something is true doesn't make it true. Colluding airport employees as well as rural airports seem like clear vulnerabilities. When thinking about security problems you don't just assume your security measure always succeed and assuming that all passengers are "equal" seems like a poor assumption, especially for an exceptional case by highly motivated people, potentially with state backing.
> how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
Politicians looking to score brownie points with either the public or the state itself.
So basically you're SOL if you're not a more equal animal or connected to them (Skip Gates), a public persona (Whistlin Diesel), attractive woman (Karen Read, though you can argue that nobody has held the cops accountable on this one, yet) or highly sympathetic individual.
There is some argument to be made that the truth comes out eventually in these sorts of matters but that's not gonna make Breonna Taylor any less dead or the Phonesavanh's kid from being any less disabled.
I think the Floyd factor also prevents cops who are alone or in a pair from escalating stuff unnecessarily as much as they used to which is where a lot of these abuses historically come from.
Most elected politicians at this point are happy to repeat the same lies of "this person was arrested because they were being violent/interfering/were acting suspiciously/refused to identify themselves" even if there is multiple sources of video evidence to the contrary. Republicans in particular have no interest in the truth where it conflicts with the claims they want to make to advance their agenda, and most Democrats are too toothless to call out this misbehavior with the force and passion it deserves.
And when they do call it out, people will be told by Fox News and others that "this senator is opposed to the work ICE is doing to solve the problem of illegal immigrants", and other news agencies will say "such-and-such official says this senator is opposed to..." and the propaganda will spread and people will believe it.
OK, I don't disagree, but there is nothing that guarantees the judiciary will act constitutionally or protect people's rights, so "who will hold the judiciary accountable if they violate your rights, try to punish you for lack of obedience, or fail to hold those who violate peoples rights accountable?""
Citizenship comes from law. Enforcers and the judiciary choose which law to enact and how to enact them. If enforcers of the "law" are more loyal to the administration than the constitution, then the law and all it's implications, such as citizenship, are up to the arbitrary whims of our new king coronated by the supreme court.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
