Papers, Please! has a wonderful recap of the work they’ve been doing for decades and how it relates to the current uproar over Trump’s executive order. The issues and risks, they want you to know, are much bigger than you may realize. Here’s a snippet of their piece:
Here are some key things we’ve learned from our work over the last 20 years that people — including those just now beginning to think about the right to fly, especially as it relates to immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers — need to understand about what is happening, who is responsible, what will happen next, and what can be done:
It’s about government control of movement, not just surveillance of travelers.
“Watchlist” is a euphemism. The list of countries whose citizens are barred from the US is a blacklist, not just a watchlist.
“Extreme vetting” means not just searching and interrogating people before allowing them to enter the US, or surveilling them while they are in the US, but not allowing them to enter the US at all. That’s one of the reasons we have never seen this as an issue that can be completely encompassed in a rubric of “privacy”.
Tools put in place and data collected by any government will be available for use and misuse by any future government.
Read more on Papers, Please!
Related to this, see Joe Cadillic’s new post, Passengers to be arrested for not showing their ID’s. As one example, Joe writes:
Arizona’s House Bill 2305 would make it a crime for passengers to decline to provide a photo ID to police. Passengers who fail to provide an ID could be sentenced to four months in jail and a $750.00 fine.
So read Papers, Please! and read Joe’s post. If you are first becoming involved, stay involved. And if you’re not involved, well, what are you waiting for?