ICE Is Hauling In More Data Than Ever And Palantir Is Helping It Turn Data Into Detainments
from the surveillance-state-adds-surveillance-capitalism dept
ICE has gotten bigger and bolder under the Trump Administration. The minimal constraints placed on it by previous administrations have been removed, allowing the agency to gorge on data and engage in widespread surveillance. Billions of dollars and an untold amount of tech are being thrown at a “problem” that isn’t even criminal. Living in this country while undocumented is a civil violation, but ICE (and the Administration) treats it as one of the most severe threats to the nation.
America is apparently going to be made great by tossing out those aspiring to be Americans, or at the very least just trying to escape the horrors or poverty of their native countries. To ensure ICE can remove as many people as possible, the agency has tapped into national ALPR databases, run facial recognition searches against drivers license databases, and hooked up with a tech company nearly as reviled as ICE is.
But that’s not the full extent of ICE’s surveillance/deportation efforts. As Alvaro M. Bedoya reports for Slate, the agency is leveraging everything it can get it hands on to ensure a steady flow of undocumented immigrants out of this country.
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.)
And it’s not enough for immigrants to steer clear of the entities that may help them get ejected from the country. ICE is all over anything that might lead it to more deportees.
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.
There’s a private company weaving this massive amount of data into usable intel for ICE. Palantir provides the software that analyzes data, builds profiles, and makes sense of ICE’s massive data stash. The company even fills in any blanks ICE might have by adding in information purchased from data brokers.
Palantir doesn’t like to talk about its work with ICE. Bedoya points out the company’s most recent securities filing makes no mention of ICE or the company’s assistance in tracking down undocumented immigrants. It prefers to discuss its military customers and its supposed commitment to keeping this country safe. When asked directly about ICE, Palantir has downplayed its involvement. This is how Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, spins things.
When criticized, Karp has described Palantir’s work for ICE as “limited,” “a de minimis part of our work”—strange things for American contractor to say about its second–largest U.S. government client.
This toxic partnership has done little to damage Palantir’s reputation — at least as far as investors are concerned. Its work with ICE targets what many consider to be unimportant people: immigrants who are in the country illegally. If the company is good at what it does and customers like ICE are happy and willing to sign multi-million dollar contracts, any moral and legal qualms shareholders might have will be papered over with money.
Filed Under: big data, data, deportation, dhs, ice, immigration, trump administration
Companies: palantir
Comments on “ICE Is Hauling In More Data Than Ever And Palantir Is Helping It Turn Data Into Detainments”
Not Just Civil
Be careful, it is also a criminal violation under 8 USC sections 1324 and 1325. Entering, trafficking, or harboring is punishable by several years in jail.
Re: Not Just Civil
…as the sponsors who were housing the children found out applied to them.
Re: Not Just Civil
I read a significant portion of illegals simply over stay their visa, so it is not all scary story stuff as you infer.
Re: Re: Not Just Civil
Yeah, but those people are often white so it doesn’t count to some people.
Re: Not Just Civil
Koby! I thought it was only section 230 that you were wilfully ignorant and/or lying about, but here you are misrepresenting other law!
The word misdemeanour might be useful to you here, as would be the main section 8 U.S. Code § 1325 which is usually applied, and carries the following penalty:
It should embarrass you that I’m so much better versed in US law than you are, but if you didn’t have your fictions what would you complain about?
The people: Palantir is a dangerous tool, ICE.
ICE: Why? Why should we fear to use it?
The people: It is not held accountable, this company. We do not know who else may be watching.
Does anyone else have the fantasy?
Some day there will be ICE hunters, people who investigate to track down every last employee of ICE to bring them to justice.
Most ICE hunters seek to drag ex-ICE to international tribune for the human atrocities in which they were complicit. When they’re lucky they get one of the known names, those who were hands on and tortured and even killed detainees.
Other ICE hunters are dissatisfied with imprisonment, given among ICE are some of the cruelest monsters humankind has manifest. Instead they’re dragged to some isolated place to suffer the sort of ending Edgar Allen Poe might write about in a place where their screams will be heard by no-one.
It was cold comfort after the war, as many of the SS — sometimes the worst of the monsters — escaped and lived long lives. But maybe it can happen for the United States, and we do have better resources to trace what atrocities occurred, who did them, and where those people are now.
a private database that includes the addresses of customers from 80 national and regional electric, cable, gas, and telephone companies.
One of the problems is that things like this should never have existed in the first place.
Re: "should never have existed"
And now that it does, it should be inaccessible to law enforcement.
Of course ICE doesn’t actually enforce the law so much as decide that some people are illegal.
They get thrown in the gulags to await trial, which doesn’t even feature an actual judge.
Meanwhile, all-you-can-eat COVID-19.
That is whybuiu need infra tee LEDs to.prevent ALPRs from ever recording your license numbet
Re: Re:
Literacy is important before you try getting across any complex ideas.
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A threat
"Living in this country while undocumented is a civil violation, but ICE (and the Administration) treats it as one of the most severe threats to the nation."
It is irrefutable that illegal immigration severely impacts black employment and black wages in the most negative way. In fact, any American at the low end of the skill set.
Thus it does not matter whether the violation is civil or criminal. And it is one of the most severe threats to the nation.
Re: A threat
"It is irrefutable that illegal immigration severely impacts black employment and black wages in the most negative way."
Then it would be simple for you to supply a link.
The difference between civil and criminal violation does matter, your rational is weak to non existent.
Please explain how illegal immigration is a severe threat to the nation. As opposed to a coup or global warming or WWIII … because I would think those represent a severe threat.
Re: Re: A threat
"Please explain how illegal immigration is a severe threat to the nation"
I’ll hazard a guess that he’s only thinking of one kind of immigration and it’s not the very real problem of legal immigrants from majority white countries overstaying their visas…
Re: Re: Re: White immigrants
California has multiple districts of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants who are do a lot of exactly that and are conspicuously unmolested by ICE or CBP.
I used to go to one for outstanding Pirozhki and Napoleons.
And not that I wish them unwell, but it is curious that their pasty faces seem to be off the hunt-and-abuse lists of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Re: Re: Re: A threat
Illegal is illegal, white, brown or green. You people just can’t get past that, no matter how much you equivocate.
Re: Re: Re:2 A threat
Certainly, from the sound of it, you must a lawyer. Probably an immigration lawyer even. It should be easy then, to support your claim.
Re: Re: Re:2 A threat
"Illegal is illegal, white, brown or green."
Yes. So why do I not hear the same howling and wailing from you people about white Europeans who are in the US illegally, but you lose your shit over a caravan of potential migrants when they’re still 1000 miles away from the border?
"You people just can’t get past that, no matter how much you equivocate."
I can, but your racist asses only think about one type of immigrant. You also attack brown legal immigrants as if they’re illegal, but that’s a different story.
Re: Re: Re:3 A threat
I read that one of these idiots yelled Go Back To Your Own Country at a native american.
Oh, and then they get upset if they hear someone not speaking american.
Re: Re: Re:4 "Go Back To Your Own Country"
What our dear president gave his base is license to hate. They’re not smart about it. They don’t understand the particulars, just that anything not them is other and enemy.
The Republican Party cultivated an instant army over decades. They just didn’t get at the time that an instant army is an army for anyone. For the lowest common denominator.
Re: Re: Re:4 A threat
Yes, such stupidity is well documented. Not exclusive to the US, sadly, but there is a form of hatred that obsesses over immigration yet only seems to care about the skin tone of the supposed offenders.
Re: Re: Re:2 "illegal is illegal"
a. We all commit felonies. Daily. Most go unenforced, but any time a prosecutor wants your ass, he owns you. (blah, blah 100.00 indictment rate, 980% conviction rate, more incarcerated per capita than any other nation)
b. Remember that with the Nuremburg laws, Jews were illegal. (Not just practicing Judaism, but being a hereditary Jew by 50%.) And plenty of Germans said illegal is illegal.
c. Extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation by the United States are legal by its own laws.
So fuck legality. And shame on you for depending legality to define your own morality.
Re: Re: Re:3 Posting before coffee
(blah, blah 100.00 indictment rate, 90% conviction rate, more incarcerated per capita than any other nation)
Re: A threat
Your belief that black Americans are inevitably at the lower end of the skilled employment market is noted. I will also note that it’s not usually black Americans who are constantly whining that unskilled Mexicans who can’t speak English are taking their jobs…
Re: A threat
I thought the threat to black employment and wages was exposed in studies that showed applicants with "black" names were less likely to get called for interviews?