The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has launched an investigation into DHS’s use of biometric data and personally identifiable information. Inspector General Joseph Cuffari confirmed the probe in a letter responding to Virginia Senators Mark Warner (D) and Tim Kaine (D) after they expressed concerns about immigration agents using facial recognition and license plate readers against protesters. Other lawmakers have proposed legislation in an attempt to limit ICE’s high-tech capabilities, alleging the agency is violating constitutional rights. ICE has no doubt expanded its surveillance tactics, but has it gone too far?

In September, ICE signed a contract worth $3.75 million with Clearview AI, a facial recognition company, for access to software to help it identify “victims and offenders in child sexual exploitation cases and assaults against law enforcement officers,” according to procurement records. After uploading a photo or snapping a picture of somebody’s face with a phone, law enforcement can search potential matching images in a database containing billions of pictures scraped from the web. The agency also uses Mobile Fortify, an app that enables agents to compare faces they encounter in the field against government databases and reveal immigration status and other biographical information.

Another tool agents have access to is called ELITE, powered by Palantir, a tech company specializing in data analysis. The software, explained 404 Media, allows DHS agents to “populate a map with potential deportation targets, bring up dossiers on each person, and view an address ‘confidence score’ based on data sourced” from government agencies. Essentially, it helps officers decide which neighborhoods to raid. Controversy remains about how broadly this tool is used.

Agents can also scan a license plate with a cellphone and use a mobile app to instantly retrieve a vehicle’s travel history, ownership records, and other personal data, with help from Thomson Reuters’s License Plate Recognition database, which includes more than 20 billion plate scans. If that’s not enough to get the job done, officers can access Flock Safety’s AI-powered license plate reader through local police departments. If Flock sounds familiar, it might be because it recently partnered with Amazon’s Ring to integrate surveillance technology into Ring cameras to “make it easier than ever for neighborhoods to work together to protect their homes and families,” according to the company’s website. ICE doesn’t have a contract with Flock, but agents only need to visit a local police department and request to use the technology. In one instance, the Dallace Police Department, on behalf of ICE, searched “6,674 different individual Flock camera networks composed of 77,771 total devices,” explained 404 Media, which reviewed the data through a public records request.

Other tools include technology that can break into locked phones and automatically sort the data, courtesy of Paragon Solutions, a company that makes spyware capable of remotely hacking into mobile phones. Immigration officers occasionally use cell-site simulators, too. Called Stingrays, these nifty buggers trick nearby mobile phones into connecting with them instead of a cell tower. The device enables agents to track a phone’s location and scan for all cellphones in the area.

The agency can also dig into commercial location data from mobile phones, with a tool called Webloc, sold by Penlink, a global provider of digital intelligence and communication surveillance software. Webloc lets agents “collect information about the mobile phones being used within a specific area during a particular time period,” explained Wired. It basically allows agents to “geofence” an area and track the phones within it. Over the years, ICE has also purchased licenses from similar companies to access consumer location data and other personal information. Buying data from brokers doesn’t require a warrant – it’s sort of a loophole.

But what does ICE do with all the data it collects?

“We have a nice little database,” a federal agent told a protester filming him in Maine last month, “and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” The White House has repeatedly denied that such a database exists, but independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported a different story a few weeks ago. He spoke to “a federal law enforcement official directly involved” who said DHS ordered federal agents to gather identifying information about people filming them and to “send that information to Intel who will do a ‘work-up’ on them.”

“There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,”  Tricia McLaughlin, the agency’s spokesperson, told CNN in January. Yet Klippenstein, after speaking to two senior national security officials, discovered “there are more than a dozen secret and obscure watchlists that homeland security and the FBI are using to track protesters,” Antifa, and whoever they deem “domestic terrorists.” These lists have “codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta.” Some of these track illegal immigrants; one is “a classified social media repository. Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking.”

“One thing I’m pushing for right now,” said border czar Tom Homan on Fox News last month, “we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous.”

This almost sounds reasonable, but one can’t help but wonder how he defines “interference,” “impeding,” and “assault.” Words have seemingly become elastic over the years, stretching and contracting when needed, depending on the person and the purpose. This especially seems true when it comes to intelligence gathering.

Ever since al Qaeda’s attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, the federal government has ramped up its surveillance on people, both domestic and foreign. Lines have been crossed, redrawn, and blurred, all in the name of national security – “for our safety.” Google and the expansion of big tech pushed the envelope further, harvesting our data for advertisers while manipulating what we see on the internet. Now, artificial intelligence is embedded in nearly everything we touch online, even our emails, scraping our words for “AI training.” Few people seem to care anymore, much less notice the constant intrusion on their privacy. It would be easy to shrug off ICE’s surveillance tactics, too. After all, the agents are going after illegal immigrants and dealing with groups like ICE Watch, which are deliberately getting in the way of immigration enforcement operations, and not everybody involved is “peaceful.” But secret deals with data brokers, watchlists with ill-defined terms, and access to spyware tech – it all sounds a bit Orwellian.

Has DHS and ICE gone too far with their surveillance tactics? Hard to tell without all the facts. But, if anything, “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent,” said Justice Louis Brandeis when dissenting in Olmstead v. United States (1928). “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

About the author: Corey Smith is a recovering bartender, and a freelance editor. He specializes in memoirs and novels but has a smorgasbord of experience in non-fiction works. In a former life, he ghostwrote several romance novels, which he denies.

Source: This article was published by Liberty Nation

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