ICE agents are now able to surveil any American citizen without their knowledge or consent. The 9/11 crisis brought us the Patriot Act and the TSA, a privacy-sapping agency of Homeland Security created by a Republican administration. The immigration crisis has brought us ICE, another privacy-sapping agency of Homeland Security, which is morphing into a federal police force that supersedes local police. Waging war against illegals will never end, and hence, ICE has no exit plan to leave our streets… ever.
This a huge attack on the First and Forth Amendments. Your right to peaceable assembly (who will dare to assemble if they know the government identifies them?) and “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” has been laid waste.
What’s the problem here? It’s the Department of Homeland Security. It should be summarily disbanded. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is acquiring powerful new surveillance tools to identify and monitor people.
They include apps that let federal agents point a cell phone at someone’s face to potentially identify them and determine their immigration status in the field, and another that can scan irises. Newly licensed software can give “access to vast amounts of location-based data,” according to an archive of the website of the company that developed it, and ICE recently revived a previously frozen contract with a company that makes spyware that can hack into cell phones.
The federal agency is also ramping up its social media surveillance, with new AI-driven software contracts, and is considering hiring 24/7 teams of contractors assigned to scouring various databases and platforms like Facebook and TikTok and creating dossiers on users.
The Trump administration is seeking to employ new technology as it tries to boost deportations to a million a year, a target that could be helped with tech to identify and locate noncitizens subject to removal.
Some Democratic members of Congress are raising legal concerns about the new technologies and are asking questions of ICE that are going unanswered. A group of U.S. senators have called on ICE to stop using a mobile facial recognition app.
“Americans have a right to walk through public spaces without being surveilled,” Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Mass. told NPR.
Privacy and civil liberties advocates also warn these surveillance tools represent a grave threat and say there is not a sufficient regulatory framework in place or oversight to ensure federal agents are using new technologies in a way that protects privacy and constitutional rights.
“Immigration powers are being used to justify mass surveillance of everybody,” said Emily Tucker, the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.
“The purpose of this is to build up a massive surveillance apparatus that can be used for whatever kind of policing the people in power decide that they want to undertake,” she said.
PERCEPTION RESET 