The more we fight facial recognition, the more our politicians try to protect it -- while pretending they're protecting us from it. Case in point: S. 2878, the so-called Facial Recognition Technology Warrant Act, which would allow police to use facial recognition tech to track people without a warrant. Our police would never abuse that power on, say, political protestors! And of course the bill would also exempt from its meager restrictions all the "foreign" surveillance that just-so-happens to catch good Americans in its web. Facial recognition is, as you know, crap technology that seems to think all black people look alike and also (in a recently-documented experiment) thinks it can spot Roy Orbison in a crowd. I mean, we wish! But, alas, Mr. Orbison passed over 30 years ago. Hence Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a real ban on facial recognition technology.
Our Administration now wants to send park rangers and park police to do border patrol work, and even if you believe in "caravans," you have to wonder why we'd send people out to do a job they're plainly not trained to do. Of course, reasoning is not a strong suit with our Administration's votaries, who lap up every lousy idea about immigration as evidence that this President is "finally doing something" about immigration -- this, after President Obama earned his reputation as the "deporter-in-chief," and our current President wishes he were deporting as many immigrants as Mr. Obama! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop misusing park rangers and park police as border control agents. Which also happens to leave our public parks understaffed, not that our Administration cares -- they would sell all our public parks to their cronies if they could! Of course, we care, and that's why we fight.
If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to stop trying to undermine shareholder activism, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Shareholders using resolutions to curb carbon emissions, stop discriminating against gays, or fight excessive executive pay -- all will be much harder to propose and enact if our SEC gets its way and makes you have to own 10 times more stock merely to propose such a resolution and make a resolution get more support before being reconsidered again. This is another occasion where you must ask: what are big corporations afraid of? Of course, we know what they're afraid of: they're afraid of anyone having a different opinion about how our world should be, and they're afraid of anyone getting their hands on their unearned moneypots. In other words, they're just like our President! But being like our President is something we must discourage.
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