ICE's Disturbing Thirst for High Tech Surveillance Tools

Adolph Hitler had the Gestapo and SS to intimidate and subdue political opponents and Stalin and Putin had the KGB and its renamed successor entity to stamp out dissent and opponents . Indeed, every would be dictatorship has had its own version of a secret police force to  threaten and silence its opponents and critics.  Now, under the Felon's regime, ICE is increasingly looking like a secret police force that is seeking to build a data base on all Americans - despite claims that it is only concerned with immigration enforcement - and use surveillance against critics of the regime who the Felon wants to label as "domestic terrorists."  While the Felon remains highly unpopular and his poll numbers are abysmal, his secret police continues to gather more and more tools to not only track down undocumented immigrants (and seemingly anyone form is a racial minority) and monitor citizens' online activity and social media accounts.  Democrats and protectors of civil liberties are decrying ICE's moves and court cases are underway seeking to stop ICE's dangerous overreach and invasion of citizens' privacy.  Hopefully, both the Felon and ICE fail and become the villains they deserve to be.  In the meantime, more than ever "big brother" is watch each of us.  A piece in Politico looks at the disturbing situation:

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is buying millions of dollars’ worth of new surveillance tools at the same time [the Felon] President Donald Trump has scaled back protections for use of civilian data — a combination that could lead to a vast expansion of domestic surveillance that goes far beyond immigrants.

Federal records show that ICE has increased its spending on surveillance technology, looking to spend more than $300 million under Trump for social-media monitoring tools, facial recognition software, license plate readers and services to find where people live and work.

These upgrades are expected to be used in ICE’s push to help fulfill the president’s campaign promise of “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” The high-tech capabilities are also coinciding with policy changes from the White House that lower the guardrails around the government’s use of data on millions of American residents and expand its potential surveillance targets. A set of executive orders is giving ICE workarounds for the decades-old federal standard that protects American residents’ privacy, and the agency itself is signaling a shift in its enforcement policy, looking beyond immigrants and toward American critics of its officers’ behavior.

ICE’s new capabilities and legal flexibility are raising concerns among privacy and civil liberty advocates that it is expanding its remit with little supervision of its powers.

“It’s very troubling, especially when you pair the ramp-up of these capabilities and the increasing exercises of these capabilities with the undermining of independent oversight,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, who chaired a board tasked with independently scrutinizing government surveillance following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Governors in several blue states have already responded by restricting ICE’s access to state-level citizen data. New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington recently cut off ICE’s access to their state motor vehicle records. In Congress, a coalition of 40 Democrats asked other governors to follow, saying in a letter that ICE’s access to DMV records allowed for “unjustified, politicized actions” from the Trump administration.

ICE’s use of facial recognition to determine immigration status has particularly troubled Democrats who worry the technology puts Americans at risk of detention and deportation.

ICE’s technology arsenal has sharply increased in the past year, with the agency investing in high-tech surveillance tools including social media monitoring powered by artificial intelligence, software to obtain phone location data, drones, license plate readers and iris scanners.

One of its largest investments is for “skip-tracing” services, typically used by debt collectors and bounty hunters to track people who are difficult to find, across new identities, homes and occupations. . . . In October, ICE awarded two contracts for skip-tracing capabilities totaling $8 million. It vastly expanded its ambitions in November, issuing a request for information for the data-intensive tracking service with a potential $281 million contract attached. In December, ICE awarded contracts to 10 companies for skip tracing services, with the potential to earn over $1 billion by the end of their contracts in 2027, The Intercept reported.

In September ICE paid $3.8 million for facial recognition tools from the company Clearview AI, which operates a database of 30 billion images scraped from online sources.

ICE also plans to expand its use of social media surveillance, WIRED reported in October, scouring billions of online posts to find leads for immigration enforcement operations.

As the agency upgrades its tools, it has also sent signals it wants to expand its mission from finding immigrants to tracing critics and stopping threats to its agents. . . . In August, the agency signaled it wants to use social media surveillance to track threats against ICE personnel by members of the public, . . . Kristi Noem has also expanded what’s considered a threat to ICE officials, telling reporters in July that “violence is anything that threatens them and their safety,” including filming its officers.

Privacy advocates argue that this new technological capability — and the mission of tracking threats against agents — widens ICE’s surveillance scope beyond immigration enforcement in dangerous ways. “ICE is already well beyond their initial responsibility and is fully into the realm of political policing of protesters and dissidents,” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst on surveillance and technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been tracking the growth of government surveillance capabilities.  “They’re building up this mass automated surveillance infrastructure,” he added, “and the question we have to be asking is: What is it for?”

Since 1974, the Privacy Act has prevented the federal government from creating a centralized database of all Americans’ information, recognizing the potential it holds for surveillance and abuse of people’s privacy. The law ensures that information a person handed over for public benefits like Medicare or Social Security can’t be easily repurposed by other agencies, including law enforcement.

ICE, however, has signed broad data-sharing agreements with multiple agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Health and Human Services.

To justify its access, ICE has cited a suite of executive orders that Trump signed earlier this year on immigration enforcement and fraud prevention.  . . . . The Privacy Act provides exemptions for law-enforcement agencies to pursue specific individuals and investigations, but not for them to access bulk data on American residents. ICE’s agreements appear to enable bulk data collections, however.

ICE’s data-sharing agreement with the SSA projects it will request up to 50,000 records a month, which includes addresses, banking data and contact information. Under its agreement with the IRS, ICE requested more than a million records in the four months after it was signed in April.

The policy changes have alarmed watchdogs, who worry that the Trump administration has removed guardrails meant to protect people from government surveillance.

“This accumulation of an immense amount of data, spanning across society and reaching into places that need to gather data about people in order for them to survive, underscores how new and dangerous it is,” American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California’s technology attorney Jake Snow, who defended an anonymous Instagram account from a DHS subpoena, said.

In any previous administration, surveillance overreach could also have been reined in by the government watchdogs on privacy and civil liberties issues, but those have been hollowed out.

The legal battles have gone back and forth: Judges have issued temporary freezes on ICE’s access to Medicaid data and taxpayer information, while the White House continues to make its case for why it is legally entitled to agencies’ data collection.