Thanks to my small, liberal arts college in Vermont not having cell reception, I had to watch one of my closest friends drive off a sheer cliff and then ran down a dark road knocking on every door while he literally roasted. It happened 6 hours after the last final and the school took no responsibility, and there wasn't enough time to even get one session in with a licensed psychiarist/psychologist. When the school year started afterwards, the school counselor, who wasn't licensed and wasn't a doctor and in fact had less schooling than I have now - I have a terminal degree in my field - tried to kidnap me and put me in the local asylum, on a Friday night no less, an old trick to keep someone locked up for longer than warranted, before getting let out on Monday. My school is the most digitally minimalist school you can imagine - no TV, slow internet, no cell phone reception, landlines and whiteboards on doors like a Bret Easton Ellis novel represented the ways people found each other. We had facebook - one of the earlier schools - and I've been trolling everyone from scientologists to flat earthers to 9/11 to each other on Somethingawful.com forums since I was 13. But so what if the options are available, they always were anyway. Sure, there was the implicit and sometimes explicit conceit that anything said on the internet need to be presumed as a joke until proven otherwise, and the ethos held up until our parents joined social media and didn't get the message. I happen to have a particular affinity for maps and so I both collected maps and memorized them - so GPS/Google Maps weren't too meaningful to me and I'm not really in a position to comment on whether it is meaningful or not, but I can certainly say that friction in tech contributed to a lot of trauma that I've never quite gotten over, and I was lucky - 3 out of 12 kids in that dorm, all of whom were close, graduated. I haven't been able trust a therapist since, but I get by.

Fast forward 5 years and I was working at a public defender's office and at some point, suddenly, police misconduct, something that we had long knew existed were being caught on video. To the average person whose contact with the police tends to be rare, even if you're a minority, it might not mean much, but I literally dealt with them every day, frequently in the felony context, and can honestly say that a trial without police perjury was a rarity, but impeaching their testimony without video or photos was next to impossible. The reduction of friction got innocent people out of jail on a regular enough basis that around Ferguson and Eric Garner it became a real movement. That was when I switched niches and went into immigration defense. ICE of course operates as pretend-cops and anything they do, they are never held responsible for, and being able to reach counsel and show a photo of the event that I can analyze and say "it's administrative, they have no judicial warrant, don't open the door and tell them that you're exercising your 4th Amendment right" is something that I both feared and relished, and the fear comes from the fact that ICE agents have shot and killed people with no consequence and removed even US citizens. The more data points I can. collect, the better, because it's almost impossible for the average person to conceptualize how much second class citizenship in this country that is also permanent - essentially the life of someone who entered without inspection, rides on fear, fear that is at least ameliorated temporarily by easily amalgamated tech, sometime I wish I had in college.

Hate the player, don't hate the game. The game, after all, saves lives and allows for someone who knows how to use it to remain free. ICE detention, of course, is not based on criminal charges (or they'd have judicial warrants... and free legal representation not from a nonprofit), and indefinite if they want it to be. These are not trivial matters. I understand friction sometimes being necessary, but this friction is frivolous and the consequence of the friction is way, way, way, too real.