ICE Wants To Set Up A Social Media Dragnet So It Can Figure Out Who’s Criticizing The Agency

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the enjoy-your-1st-amendment-while-you-still-can dept

Apparently, ICE is feeling it might deal with a bit more backlash than normal now that Trump is back in charge and promising to expel as many immigrants as he can as quickly as he can. Rather than deal with it like grownups with big boy pants and black ICE shirts, the agency has decided it needs to employ a social media dragnet to keep apace with “threats” and mean stuff people are saying.

Here’s Sam Biddle with more details for The Intercept:

Citing an increase in threats to ICE agents and leadership, the agency is soliciting pitches from private companies to monitor threats across the internet — with a special focus on social media. People who simply criticize ICE online could pulled into the dragnet.

“In order to prevent adversaries from successfully targeting ICE Senior leaders, personnel and facilities, ICE requires real-time threat mitigation and monitoring services, vulnerability assessments, and proactive threat monitoring services,” the procurement document reads.

If this scanning uncovers anything the agency deems suspicious, ICE is asking its contractors to drill down into the background of social media users.

Now, Biddle says the document [PDF] “cites an increase in threats,” which is being far too kind. The request for services simply says this is happening, without actually citing anything at all in support of this claim of “increased threats.”

In fact, what the actual wording says suggests something different: ICE is experiencing an uptick in visible criticism from publicly-accessible social media accounts, which is definitely not the same thing as evidence it’s more dangerous to be employed by ICE now than it has been in the past.

Over the last two years, ICE has experienced an increased level of external threat activity directed towards its Senior leaders, personnel and facilities. Much of this threat activity originates from social media and online postings and has since expanded to physical attacks on ICE facilities and the homes of ICE employees.

There are no footnotes, no links to news reports detailing this “increase,” no citations of other government reports (you know, like DOJ indictments, etc.) that would support this assertion. The DHS simply says it exists and hopes no one will ask too many questions.

But the whole document prompts several questions the document isn’t capable of answering. And I certainly wouldn’t expect DHS or ICE officials to offer any answers any time in the near or distant future.

On top of asking for full-time social media monitoring, it certainly looks like ICE wants to get back in bed with Clearview, which is currently the only facial recognition tech firm capable of supplying what’s being asked for here:

Facial Recognition capabilities that could take a photograph of a subject and search the internet to find all relevant information associated with the subject that will help identify any individual making a threat and help cross reference the individual across multiple platforms.

Clearview has made a pariah of itself by scraping the web for any personal information that isn’t locked down and compiling a database containing more than 10 billion images and other data points that it then sells to, well, whoever wants to buy access. No other facial recognition tech firm even comes close.

Like the rest of the document, this paragraph is clumsily worded. Presumably ICE is seeking a service that can utilize an uploaded image to search for matching photos and other personal information. I certainly don’t believe ICE expects this service to “take photos” in the normally understood context, like say, by triggering someone’s laptop camera while they post criticism of ICE on… well, probably not xTwitter, but other social media services.

Speaking of clumsy wording, no government solicitation for services should be as badly written as this one is:

Contractor will analyze individual(s) and/or organization(s) making threats. Analysis should include: 1). Previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE; 2). Information which would indicate the individual(s) and/or the organization(s) making threats have a proclivity for violence; and 3). Information indicating a potential for carrying out a threat (such as postings depicting weapons, acts of violence, refences to acts of violence, to include empathy or affiliation with a group which has violent tendencies; references to violent acts; affections with violent acts; eluding to violent acts, etc.).

Have fun with that paragraph. It looks like it was written by two kids dressed in a trench coat.

While there is plenty of wording up front that makes it seem as though this is just a preventative measure to ensure the safety of government employees, there’s plenty of wording later in the document that makes it clear ICE is looking for tech that allows it to monitor people simply because they don’t like ICE.

Back to Biddle and The Intercept:

[T]he winning contractor will not simply flag threatening remarks but “Provide monitoring and analysis of behavioral and social media sentiment (i.e. positive, neutral, and negative).” This includes regular updates on the “total number of negative references to ICE found in social media” from week to week.

And that’s a First Amendment problem. The government shouldn’t be actively monitoring social media users, much less for the stated purpose of tallying the amount of negative references caught in the dragnet. Even if all the information is “open source” (i.e., scraped from publicly-accessible social media accounts), this is not a legitimate use of government power. It’s especially questionable when the agency desiring to deploy this power can’t seem to differentiate clearly between negative comments and “threats” against ICE personnel or even enumerate this supposed “elevated threat” that somehow demands the installation of an internet dragnet that comes with facial recognition tech attached.

This is stupid, scary, fascist bullshit. Dressing it up in jargon-laden boilerplate doesn’t disguise the fact that it’s just a petty revenge program ICE can use to, at the very least, discourage dissent… at least up until it’s given explicit executive-level permission to get to the business of silencing it.

And somehow we, the people, are suspected of being more threatening to ICE than ICE is to society at large. The people say otherwise. They’re so sure ICE is invincible, they’re impersonating ICE officers to commit acts of violence, like accosting minorities and threatening them with deportation. Or, you know, leveraging fear of immigration officers to beat and rape a 51-year-old woman. And maybe these, too, are anomalies. But at least I’m capable of citing cases to support my assertions, unlike the multi-billion dollar DHS, which thinks all it needs to support a claim is the pixels needed to print the words on its PDFs.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, dhs, facial recognition, free speech, ice, immigration, social media monitoring