ICE is only one of the federal agencies surveilling people. Federal surveillance reaches far beyond immigrants. Federal agents use massive databases, facial recognition, cell phone photos, and license plate records. Beyond surveillance, they target and threaten people involved in protests, bringing the full weight of federal power to bear on individuals. Their actions often remain hidden from public view and from judicial restraint. With seeming impunity, they ignore and violate constitutional mandates protecting freedom of speech, press, and assembly.
Targeting Activists and Journalists
During the ICE siege of Minnesota, surveillance and threats against activists and others happened every day. Federal agents thrust cell phones in people’s faces to take photos. They photographed license plate and looked up home addresses in motor vehicle records. They followed school officials and school board members to their homes, sometimes stationing multiple vehicles outside their homes or schools. Their targets included people like Emily.
[NPR] “On an evening in late January, Emily was driving through her Minneapolis neighborhood doing something that had become part of her routine in recent weeks: patrolling for ICE.
“Emily, who NPR is only identifying by her first name because she fears retribution from the federal government, says she followed an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot. ‘And then someone leaned out of the passenger side of that SUV and took a picture of me and my car,’ she says.
“Emily says she decided to leave at that point, but the SUV made a sudden U-turn and barreled towards her, braking next to her driver’s side window. A female agent wearing a gaiter-style mask rolled down the window, leaned out — and addressed Emily by name.
“‘She yelled, ‘Emily, Emily, we’re going to take you home!’ Then she looked at her phone and she recited my home address,’ she says.
“Emily says she didn’t acknowledge the agents and drove away, but was so shaken that she didn’t drive home, afraid the agents might follow her there. Instead she went to a nearby restaurant and waited for hours.
“‘I don’t know how they pulled [my information] up, if they had something on me already, or if they pulled my registration,’ she says. ‘Their message was not subtle, right? They were in effect, saying, ‘We see you. We can get to you whenever we want to.’ And it did scare me.'”
Trump administration officials deny that they have databases of protesters. Agents on the ground contradict them. In Maine, a masked agent told one protester, “We have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”
Spying on Social Media
Under Trump, surveillance of immigrant social media presence has become routine: anyone applying for any immigration benefit may be required to furnish all of their social media handles and passwords, and sometimes those of family members as well. That includes family members who are U.S. citizens. Federal demands for information may reach back for years, and include work accounts as well as personal accounts. The official justification is that the government wants to screen for “hostile attitudes” and “anti-Americanism.”
Intimidating anyone, citizen or non-citizen, from exercising constitutionally protected rights to free speech and freedom of association is bad enough. Now social media surveillance reaches much farther, and includes deceptive tactics called “masked engagement.” Ken Klippenstein explains:
“Homeland security is increasing the use of undercover techniques to infiltrate and interact with social media users in order to collect intelligence and target individuals, documents leaked to me reveal.
“The new program, called ‘masked engagement,’ allows homeland security officers to assume false identities and interact with users—friending them, joining closed groups, and gaining access to otherwise private postings, photographs, friend lists and more.
“A senior Department of Homeland Security official tells me that over 6,500 field agents and intelligence operatives can use the new tool, a significant increase explicitly linked to more intense monitoring of American citizens.”
In addition to scraping social media accounts and lurking online, the feds demand full and secret access to social media accounts through the administrative subpoenas. Unlike search warrants or wiretaps or just about any other government intrusion on privacy, these subpoenas do not need any kind of judicial approval. Moreover, they are often secret—the target of the subpoena has no idea that it has issued. DHS often tells social media companies that they may not notify the targets.
In recent months, DHS has ordered social media companies to send them the “names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.” These subpoenas have gone to (at least) Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
The Washington Post detailed one case, a 67-year-old man named Jon, who works in the insurance industry. Jon sent an email to the lead prosecutor trying to deport an Afghan man who applied for asylum. The email was short:
“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life. Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”
Five hours later, as Jon and his wife watched TV, an email notice popped up on his phone: Google had been subpoenaed for his records. Jon called an attorney, and they began trying to figure out how to sue to stop a subpoena they had never seen.
A few days after the Washington Post contacted them, Google sent Jon a copy of the subpoena. That meant Google was disregarding the federal notice at the bottom of the subpoena, which told them not to tell Jon about it. Perhaps the involvement of the Washington Post and the ACLU made a difference—Google did not send Jon’s information to the feds.
“Among [DHS] demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license and Social Security numbers.”
Before Jon got the copy, though, something else happened. On November 17, federal agents, accompanied by local police, showed up on his doorstep. Jon had no criminal record and had never been arrested. Now what?
One of them showed him a copy of his email—the email of a U.S. citizen to a government official—and asked for an explanation. They appeared not to know about the subpoena, but had been told by someone in DHS to question Jon. After a short conversation, they left.
On February 5, in the lawsuit filed by the ACLU on Jon’s behalf, DHS retracted the subpoena and said that its investigation was closed. That investigation of an email sent by a U.S. citizen expressing his opinion to a government official, calling for the exercise of “common sense and decency” should never have begun.
Use of administrative subpoenas has ballooned under the Trump administration. These subpoenas reach far beyond social media. The Washington Post reports:
“In July, the agency demanded broad employment records from Harvard University with what the school’s attorneys described as ‘unprecedented administrative subpoenas.’ In September, Homeland Security used one to try to identify Instagram users who posted about ICE raids in Los Angeles. Last month, the agency used another to demand detailed personal information about some 7,000 workers in a Minnesota health system whose staff had protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s intrusion into one of its hospitals.”
Private Security Records and Ring
When NCIS runs “facial rec” on TV on Tuesday night, it seems like a great tool. Reality is a little different.
While facial recognition technology is imperfect and often errs, its use by federal forces seems widespread. Federal agents in Minnesota used it to identify an ICE observer. Then her PreCheck and Global entry were canceled, in obvious retaliation for her activism. She is one of several individuals who sued to stop the unconstitutional threat to First Amendment activity.
[LawDork] “In a sworn statement filed late last month, Nicole Cleland, who identified herself as a Richfield resident and director with Target Corporation, wrote that she was following federal agents in her car on Jan. 10 to observe their actions when one of the agents approached her, addressed her by name, and told her he was recording her and had facial recognition technology.”
A similar lawsuit was filed in Maine, challenging federal threats to observers there.
Taking a photo of someone in public is not illegal. Targeting someone with reprisals for exercising their First Amendment rights—that’s grossly illegal.
Among the tools used by ICE and CBP is a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify. Its use was approved by ICE only after removing previous privacy safeguards.
The feds contract with private, for-profit organizations that base facial recognition on images scraped from the internet. Maybe you have a profile photo on Facebook. Your brother posted a photo from a family birthday party on Instagram. Your employer posts photos and short bios of execs. A nonprofit posts photos from its annual gala. All of these are accessible to businesses like Clearview AI, which has collected billions of photos from the internet. The Border Patrol contracts with Clearview AI for facial recognition.
[Wired] “Recent testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which evaluated Clearview AI among other vendors, found that face-search systems can perform well on ‘high-quality visa-like photos’ but falter in less controlled settings. …
“NIST says agencies may operate the software in an ‘investigative’ setting that returns a ranked list of candidates for human review rather than a single confirmed match. When systems are configured to always return candidates, however, searches for people not already in the database will still generate “matches” for review. In those cases, the results will always be 100 percent wrong.”
Ring doorbell cameras form part of the network of surveillance turned against anyone who is an enemy of the state—protester, immigrant, or porch pirate.
[404 Media] “Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years. Ring rose to prominence as a piece of package theft prevention tech owned by Amazon and by forming partnerships with local police around the country, asking them to shill their doorbell cameras to people in their neighborhoods in return for a system that allowed police to request footage from individual users without a warrant. …
“Unlike, say, data analytics giant Palantir or some other high-profile surveillance companies, Ring is a surveillance network that homeowners have by and large deployed themselves, powered by fear mongering against our neighbors and unfettered consumerism.”
Ring came to national attention with its Superbowl brag about using its cameras to find lost dogs. That cause an uproar, leading Ring to say it had disabled the app. But spying continues. Police still request access to camera footage from doorbell cameras, including but not limited to the Ring brand. Sometimes the government can access data stored in the cloud, even when the doorbell service had been deactivated.
Tressie McMillan Cottom warned in an op/ed in the New York Times:
“Imagine what our country would look like if a federal agency compiled everything it could find about you on the open market, and then paired it with your most sensitive personal data and the full weight of the federal surveillance apparatus. The result would be a system that could not only track you but pretty accurately predict your choices, behaviors and vulnerabilities. The agency might decline to tell you how the database would be used, or, worse, deny that such a database exists at all. In these times, we ought to assume the worst-case scenario: that every technological layer added to our democratic institutions has the potential to be hostile to civil liberties.”
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Mary Turck