ICE Has An Internet Surveillance Power Tool That Keeps Tabs On More Than 200 Websites
from the collect-it-all,-domestic-version dept
The DHS and its main anti-immigration component, ICE, have always been big fans of social media surveillance. This has been part of the so-called “enhanced screening” protocols for several years now, deployed against foreign residents upon arrival in this nation, whether at border crossings or international airports where they’re just flying in for a short-term visit.
ICE has utilized a variety of tech tools to accomplish massive amounts of surveillance, ranging from purchasing location data from third-party data brokers to helping itself to utility bill databases to help it hunt down undocumented immigrants.
The latest collect-it-all tech being utilized by ICE continuously harvests and collates data and communications pulled from dozens of social media services and websites, as Joseph Cox reports for 404 Media.
A contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and many other U.S. government agencies has developed a tool that lets analysts more easily pull a target individual’s publicly available data from a wide array of sites, social networks, apps, and services across the web at once, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, and various Meta platforms, according to a leaked list of the sites obtained by 404 Media. In all the list names more than 200 sites that the contractor, called ShadowDragon, pulls data from and makes available to its government clients, allowing them to map out a person’s activity, movements, and relationships.
The entire list [PDF] covers far more than the usual social media services used by billions around the globe. It also targets lots of off-the-beaten internet path sites, like services catering to furries, car owners (Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Subaru, Stellantis, and General Motors are all on the list), bodybuilders, book readers, users of multiple dating sites, house hunters, porn watchers, and tech-ish browsers who might use sites like YCombinator (a.k.a., the home of HackerNews) and Github. Also on the list (somewhat surprisingly): TruthSocial and Rumble, sites largely known for catering to Trump and his white nationalist buddies. (Signal is also targeted, but it’s unlikely anything useful is being harvested from that service.)
It may not just be foreign residents or undocumented residents being subjected to this form of surveillance. As Cox notes in his report, ShadowDragon’s marketing materials point out it can be used to “monitor protests” and suggests it has already has been used for this purpose (with or without a government directive — the text doesn’t make it clear) during Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, DC in 2023. On top of that, ICE has already made it clear it wants to erect a social media dragnet just so it can seek out people who are critical of the agency and its actions.
It basically seems like Clearview, but without the facial recognition component. A ton of stuff is scraped from the open web and all anyone needs to search this database is literally any information at all ICE might have about the people they’re looking to locate.
In one promotional video, ShadowDragon says users can enter “an email, an alias, a name, a phone number, a variety of different things, and immediately have information on your target. We can see interests, we can see who friends are, pictures, videos.”
Beyond the obvious chilling effect this creates, as well as the shaky legal ground underpinning bulk harvesting of data and communications, there’s the potential this has to generate false positives that ICE officers will treat as all the justification they need to arrest, detain, and eject people who are actually in this country legally. We’ve already seen green card holders and travelers with temporary visas being thrown into indefinite detention despite possessing all the proper paperwork.
On top of that, ShadowDragon’s tool is pretty much just a web scraper that violates the terms of use of pretty much every site/service it harvests data from. The ends can’t justify the means. The company claims it doesn’t perform searches of the listed sites for data until a customer requests one, but whether or not it’s actually a live query, it still involves running scripts that scrape data from sites that forbid this practice. It’s not a tech logging into each site and running searches the way normal humans do. If that’s all it was, there would be no reason to pay for the service.
Whatever the real facts are, we probably won’t see them until ICE moves on to the next, more powerful option. All we have right now is the leaked list, ShadowDragon’s promotional materials, ICE’s refusal to comment, and its contractor’s public statement, which insists this is all so extremely legal it couldn’t possibly even violate the terms of use of the 200+ sites it pulls data from. What cannot be argued is that the government wants more eyes in more places with each passing year. When the only way to stay unseen is to fall off the ‘net completely, it’s clear there’s no real “trade off” between privacy and public safety happening here.
Filed Under: dhs, ice, immigration, social media, socialnet, surveillance
Companies: shadowdragon
Comments on “ICE Has An Internet Surveillance Power Tool That Keeps Tabs On More Than 200 Websites”
Bit disappointed you didn’t make the cut.
This is one reason you use pseudonyms and limit the amount of photos/video of you correctly labeled on the Internet.
I have a succinct LinkedIn profile, and that’s almost it. Other people with my name have all sorts of stuff out there, but it’s all pretty verifiably not me, so they have to revert to my LinkedIn data, which I control.
If DHS have an issue with my LinkedIn profile, the US has even bigger problems than I thought.
Sounds like people need to start criticizing ICE on a lot more websites, and not just for its fascism and racism, but also its tech intrusions.
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Also sounds like those users need to alert the sites that until the sites take iron-clad steps to exclude this kind of scraping, they’re going to avoid further use.
And when the advertisers get wind of these kinds of threats, guess what happens next….
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Not every site will be able to employ measures to stop the government scraping their content. It sounds like someone needs to file an injunction against the government actions.
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And make clear it’s a First Amendment issue. If you fear the government may make mountains out of molehills based on the data it scrapes (as has happened with data scraped by private companies), that has a pretty chilling effect on speech.
Time to put AI on the job of helping ice upping the number of site 100 fold. More is better, Murika!!
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Yes, exactly. Give them a much bigger haystack to sift through.
The schadenfreude of the same liberals who always screamed, “No shut up, you’re wrong!” when telling them Obama normalizing agencies having this kind of intel was going to make the U.S. a dystopia now screaming “How could this have gone so wrong?!” is the one thing that’s making life worthwhile.
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Laughing at the other crabs in the bucket won’t keep you from the skillet.
Call me an ignoramus, because I probably am one, but I’m admittedly skeptical to the supposed script kiddie scraping magic this service offers. The way it’s framed is that it can perform miracles, but from what I’ve learned re: cybersecurity, a public-facing website only allows access (outside of warrants or breaches) to what the site shows.
Now, I’m not referring to archiving the public database or monitoring someone’s posting routine. I’m referring to the services’ own claims about things merely needing an email or an alias to create a roadmap of a person, nevermind questions of whether an email is being made readily accessible to anybody but the service itself (which most services on the list don’t). Sure, if you use the same email or the same alias across several websites, that does make you easier to track, but it makes you easier to track by Anybody. The same goes for posting the same pictures (or videos) with identifying information attached across sites.
Not removing EXIF data from photos being posted publicly to Reddit literally lead to bunkers in Ukraine being bombed, and is responsible for more than a couple cases of doxxing. You can identify someone based on them using the same file names for stuff they post on 4chan, which has been noticed by more than one user calling someone out for sockpuppeting (which is probably why 4chan Archives is on the list). More than one person has been discovered and recorded because they posted a selfie on one site alongside identifying information ‘I work at [X] company’ that can be tracked to their LinkedIn.
I don’t doubt they’re scraping all the sites, but I’m dubious as to how much the information they have access to is reliant on the service’s powers rather than what the users provide. You can identify someone based on their cited birthday, but what if they put in a fake birthday? What if the site doesn’t make the birthday public, which several websites on the list don’t do? Yeah, you can identify someone if their email is [legalname]@whatever, but what if they use an email just for the site? What if they use one of those burner email services that’re literally a search away as you read this? Yeah, obviously they can check a Proton mail against a list of user emails on a site, but then that a) requires that to be available info, which is hardly kosher to begin with and b) for the email to not be what I’ve just gone over. This is why one a many site admin has yelled at people for using their government or university emails to sign up for things they really, really shouldn’t with such an email.
This is probably also why Furaffinity is on the list since a lot of furries have identifiable fursonas which they use (alongside the same usernames) across several sites, as an example. Being Identifiable, rather having an Identity is a whole thing in the community, so of course that’s up for easy grabs – at least in theory. Point being it’s what you provide, not that you merely Exist, at least in the context of this service – obviously government agencies can do a whole lot more, but this isn’t a government agency. It’s a web scraping service, not the NSA. A web scraping service that also very much relies on presenting itself as something bigger to sell itself to (very much problematic) government agencies, which should be considered when discussing it.
I also notice in the list that they claim to be scraping and monitoring the ‘Dark Web’, which… yeah, sure. Mhm. Also Signal, which I doubt, but I feel less secure in that doubt.
FTFY. YW. 😉
interesting hole
Between Facebook and Fansly there is an empty space. I wonder what was there before?
The entry might have been removed due to losing access or it was possibly redacted.
FurAffinity
Elder furry here lol. I’m not particularly shocked FA and IMVU are being targeted by ice, given the fandom is 90% gay lefties lol. But the IMVU connection suggests the tool is a few years old imo: IMVU owned FA up until the recently deceased site owner Dragoneer bought it back in 2022/23, and became independent again (FA is under “Frost Dragon Art” officially).
To me, including IMVU on this list says this tool existed at least 2 years ago, when FA was sold back to Neer. I do not know why this tool would include both companies without that connection. Why not Second Life? Why not WoW? Because of the chat functionality? Telegram and Discord archives makes sense for similar reasons, given its popularity within the fandom, but the IMVU/FA connection tells me more than a lot else in that pdf.
Not sure how they can monitor protonmail unless you are emailing them from there
tRump's Fascist Regime
Immigration Customs and Enforcement can go where the sun doesn’t shine. ICEtapo officers are racists who used to wet their drawers, for this opportunity back in the day. Now, finally, it’s here. Check the spots on their clothing and bedsheets.