Biometric surveillance practices of ICE
Information Certainty: Documented
Deployment Purpose: Surveillance
| Summary |
|---|
| 0 |
Products and Institutions:
| Product Deployed | Clearview AI (Software) Palantir (Software) |
|---|---|
| Institutions ⠉ | Clearview AI Palantir |
| Datasets | Clearview AI (Dataset) Unknown Dataset 0057 Palantir (Dataset) |
| Search software |
Status and Events:
| Status | Ongoing |
|---|---|
| Events | Start (2 January 2008, Documented, , No description) |
| Start Date | |
| End Date |
Users:
| Involved Entities | FBI DHS US Federal Government |
|---|---|
| Managed by | Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) |
| Used by | Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) |
Location:
| City | Washington (DC) |
|---|---|
| Country ⠉ | USA |
Description[ ]
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collects data on people in the USA at a mass scale. Some of this data is biometric. The purpose of ICE's data collection has always been to surveil and deport, but it is increasingly used in predictive decision making and increasingly interconnected with other private and public actors in data collection efforts. A recent 2 year investigation by Georgetowns Centre for Privacy & Technology highlights the extent of these practices and argues they are tantamount to a surveillance 'dragnet'. However, these practices at federal and local level are not novel, they can be traced to the founding of ICE post 9/11, and also far into the US's history as a state and federation. The involvement of Palantir, a data analysis and visualisation company, has extended the predictive elements of tracking and targeting certain populations or actions.
Dragnet surveillance is defined by Sarah Brayne as follows:
Dragnet surveillance, meaning surveillance tools that gather information on everyone, rather than merely those under suspicion. Dragnet surveillance widens and deepens social oversight: it includes a broader swath of people and can follow any single individual across a greater range of institutional settings. Dragnet surveillance is associated with three key transformations in the practice of policing: (1) the shift from query-based to alert-based systems makes it possible to systematically surveil an unprecedentedly large number of people; (2) individuals with no direct police contact are now included in law enforcement systems, lowering the threshold for inclusion in police databases; and (3) institutional data systems are integrated, with police now collecting and using information gleaned from institutions not typically associated with crime control.” 1
The results of the report specify the workings of the dragnet.
Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency. Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives. By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time. In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has – without any judicial, legislative or public oversight – reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity 3
In fact, ICE has used face recognition technology to search through the driver’s license photographs of around 1 in 3 (32%) of all adults in the U.S. The agency has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 (74%) adults and tracks the movements of cars in cities home to nearly 3 in 4 (70%) adults. When 3 in 4 (74%) adults in the U.S. connected the gas, electricity, phone or internet in a new home, ICE was able to automatically learn their new address. Almost all of that has been done warrantlessly and in secret 3
A review of over 100,000 spending transactions by ICE reveals that the agency spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing initiatives. Those transactions also reveal that ICE was building up advanced surveillance capacities roughly half a decade earlier than previously known. Until now, the earliest records obtained by the Center on Privacy & Technology suggested that ICE began requesting and using face recognition searches on state and local data sets in 2013. However, our research uncovered a contract from 2008 between ICE and the biometrics contractor L-1 Identity Solutions. The contract enabled ICE to access the Rhode Island motor vehicle department’s face recognition database to “recognize criminal aliens.” That places the first known ICE face recognition searches during the waning days of the George W. Bush administration 3
These practices have been reported since 2020 by journalists.
Hundreds of thousands of undocumented people have trusted state DMVs with that information to apply for driver’s privileges. However, in at least five of those 17 jurisdictions, ICE can warrantlessly search through state driver records for the purpose of civil immigration enforcement. In at least six of those 17 jurisdictions, ICE has used face recognition to scan drivers’ license photographs to carry out deportations 3
Many immigrants avoid contact with any government agency, even the DMV, but they can’t go without heat, electricity, or water; ICE aimed to find them, too. So, that same year, ICE paid for access to a private database that includes the addresses of customers from 80 national and regional electric, cable, gas, and telephone companies. Amid this bonanza, at least, the Obama administration still acknowledged red lines. Some data were too invasive, some uses too immoral. Under Donald Trump, these limits fell away 2
In 2017, breaking with prior practice, ICE started to use data from interviews with scared, detained kids and their relatives to find and arrest more than 500 sponsors who stepped forward to take in the children. At the same time, ICE announced a plan for a social media monitoring program that would use artificial intelligence to automatically flag 10,000 people per month for deportation investigations. (It was scuttled only when computer scientists helpfully indicated that the proposed system was impossible.) The next year, ICE secured access to 5 billion license plate scans from public parking lots and roadways, a hoard that tracks the drives of 60 percent of Americans—an initiative blocked by Department of Homeland Security leadership four years earlier. In August, the agency cut a deal with Clearview AI, whose technology identifies people by comparing their faces not to millions of driver photos, but to 3 billion images from social media and other sites 2
This is where Palantir’s work for ICE comes into focus. A panoply of companies collect the data. Palantir connects the dots. The firm helps agents access different databases, build profiles from disparate sources, from commercial data brokers to driver’s license records, and see how targets interrelate to each other. The company’s software appears to be part of the agency’s largest and most aggressive enforcement actions. Indeed, the plan for the 2017 operation that first targeted the sponsors of unaccompanied immigrant kids, obtained by the immigrant rights group Mijente, reveals a complex web of interlocking agencies, including Health and Human Services, Customs and Border Protection, and two branches of ICE. To track the moving pieces, the paper repeatedly tells officials to enter data into “ICM,” ICE’s custom-built Investigative Case Management software. Who wrote that code? Palantir 2
Th extent of the practices and their evolution is difficult to trace.
While a few political leaders have pressed ICE in oversight letters and used appropriations riders to end the most aggressive of ICE’s actions, to date there has not been one full congressional hearing or Government Accountability Office (GAO) report focused on ICE surveillance 3
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- Security_Vision_Wiki_References#_SCITE6a8957dd0d348c3fc2bda84884bb0dc3
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