ICE Is Tracking Your Every Move

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/05/ice-surveillance-data-dmvs-immigration-citizens-palantir

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has long been a magnet for controversy over its cruel treatment of migrants. But there’s another, potentially more alarming reason to worry about it: ICE has slowly transformed into a vast domestic spying agency that could easily be turned on the American people, whether citizens, documented, or undocumented.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology, which argues that through contracts and partnerships with private data brokers, utility companies, DMVs, and other government bureaucracies, ICE has quietly built a system that lets it peer into and track the personal lives of all Americans on a never-before-seen scale. Titled American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, the report paints a picture of an agency that’s crossed ethical lines, dodged legal restrictions, and radically expanded the scope of its activities with little to no public oversight or debate.

The numbers involved are staggering. According to the report, ICE has used facial-recognition technology to scan the driver’s license photos of roughly a third of US adults, can access the driver’s license data of three-quarters of adults, and can track the movements of cars in cities that make up 70 percent of the adult population. In at least five of the seventeen jurisdictions where undocumented people can apply for licenses, ICE can search state driver records without a warrant.

ICE’s partnership with data brokers who collect information from utility companies gave it access to data on more than 218 million utility customers in every state, allowing it to automatically find out the new addresses of three in four adults when they connected their electricity, gas, internet, or phone. The agency is swimming in so much data, states the report, that it works with half a dozen contractors to sort through and understand it all. One of those companies, Peter Thiel’s Palantir, is the third-largest company it contracts with overall.