ICE's Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200M Images
404media.co> The app represents an unprecedented linking of government databases into a single tool, including from the State Department, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the FBI, and state records
I think we're well past the point of stopping these dystopian practices given the government has already collected this data. They're merely using it how they want. If you go through customs as a US citizen, you don't even need to hand over your passport: they just scan your face now.
Calling out these practices is good, but the time to stop this would've been after 9/11 and the ensuing terrorism hysteria (Patriot Act, FISA, etc..) which gave three letter agencies the go-ahead to do whatever they want.
To adapt a common adage, maybe immediately post 9/11 would have been the best time. Now is the second best.
Definitely. I think that would be very hard to carry out for various reasons, though. Intelligence agencies generally want minimal oversight and more power so you'd be fighting that at every corner which includes:
1) Vague threats to leak/expose Congress members' personal matters who craft legislation against them. Chuck Schumer (a sitting US senator) admitted on live TV that the intel community has "six ways from Sunday" to get back at you.
2) Blatant disregard for the law by "just following orders", see anecdotes about Michael Hayden, a former CIA director.
3) Data storage, backup, and classified systems. Decades of collection probably means this data is scattered in many places which could give these agencies a chance to retain data "accidentally" or put up roadblocks due to high level clearances being required to work with these systems.
I agree - but technology is just a tool here. The Stasi famously had a network of human informants to notice and collect information.
Going forward it would be nice if we stopped letting these mobs grab power but it's too late, so maybe the effort should be focused on using tools like this to our advantage. Surely there must be some value to the populous to track their oppressors and those that control them - have you considered building a citizen-powered system so you can watch the watchers?
The Stasi network was infamous because of how enormous it was, not its mere existence. And it likely had a crippling effect on their economy. They were also drowning in information, and the information was very poor because anyone with a bone to pick just made up some bullshit about the other person.
Today, tools created by US intelligence make the data collection trivial, but more importantly, the data analysis is trivial as well.
> the data analysis is trivial as well
We have no evidence of this.
The amusing thing was that political prisoners became a money making scheme. The DDR sold dissidents to West Germany.
Ofcourse it was mostly the educated elite who wanted out so it still ended up sinking the communist regime long term.
> so you can watch the watchers
Watch in what way? And would it matter seeing as they have the full force of the government behind them anyway?
To add to it, I crossed the border into the US via train recently, and for the first time (I've done this trip many, many times) they took my photo on their cell phone after scanning my paperwork, as they did with everyone else. So they are further expanding with more/recent data.
> If you go through customs as a US citizen, you don't even need to hand over your passport: they just scan your face now.
It's always amazed me how well this works when they are scanning you with the same 2015-era cheap logitech camera I have.
The "magic" is that they have it all joined with the database that tells them who crossed the other way recently, the flight database or the cruise ship database so it's not searching through millions of passport photos every time. They have a pretty good idea of the search space.
It's weaponized pivot tables all the way down.
US requires all passenger manifests for flights are forwarded to USCBP 48 hours or more before the flight. This list is run against several databases to identify persons of interest.
Then after the flight takes off, an updated list is sent again to USCBP.
So when you walk up to USCBP, they already have a list of people they expect to see within an hour of the flight landing. The match is much easier at that point.
It all falls apart at land or sea border crossings. Requirements are quite different and travel outside continental US but with zone like the Caribbean are treated differently than travel outside that zone.
As such your immigration record can get messed up if you say exit via land border to Canada as there is no exit record to match up with entry. Many people have gotten email about overstays because of this.
They already know you’re coming in and on which flight so that really narrows it down. I didn’t think faces were that unique and that they were matching on the subset of people they were expecting at that time. Perhaps the technology is better than I thought.
The time to stop it is right now before it gets a massive boost in funding and becomes unstoppable. “Oh no too late” is literally the worst advice I’ve ever heard. Get all hands on deck right now.
It's like this
>go take a flight >demand your photo be taken >"as far as I know it's mandatory" >"I assure you the image is deleted" >"fingerprints derived from the image, what are those" Thanks TSA for logging the facial parameters of 200 million citizens, I'm sure that invasion of privacy helped your basic mission, to screen passengers for planes
In theory, a law could be proposed at any time, voted on soon after, and the Executive branch should have to follow it.
Yes, that is the trend of the United States: the Executive branch listening to the Legislative.
Consider now that precedents for the Judicial being ignored are well underway.
We have an incompetent authoritarian in office right now. A mere slice of competence and we'd already be worse-than-1984.
Hm. No, I think the practice of using a capability for a bad goal is inherently worse than merely having a capability that can be used for a bad goal. (The whole principle behind the second amendment, after all!)
And we should condemn the overreach on its own terms and by its own moral failings and not just wave it away with a both-sides-ist "They're merely using it how they want".
Bad things are bad and we should say they are bad. Because at the end of the day every government is possessed of terrible power and the only reason any of them don't get worse is that we vote for the people who aren't bad.
The point of my comment was to say: you don't choose how the government uses this data against you. Yes, it's bad and should be condemned. But, to completely eliminate this "avenue" of attack then we should've stopped all this data collection in the first place.
And my point was that this is a nitpicky digression relative to the specific crime in progress.
The Godwin equivalent would be discussing the holocaust and replying "Well, if Germany didn't want that they shouldn't have elected the Nazis in 1933." It's true! But unhelpful in context.
it is made with public money, and as it can't be stopped, it should just be made available to the general public and businesses. I think that should be applied to all the government collected info (except for narrow cases specifically excluded like health and IRS records - though i think IRS records also should be public)
That sounds like a perfect way to make a disastrous situation an order of magnitude more disastrous.
That thinking is how we're getting more and more power asymmetry between government and society. The government knows everything about everybody (even if today it is 90% true it will be 100% tomorrow anyway), and thus has unlimited power over everybody. The only way to defang such power is to make the info public from the beginning.
I don't see how anything is made safer by having everyone and their dog able to access the same information about me that the government has. It's terrible that the government has it and unsiloed it. The rest of the world having it as well doesn't improve that situation. It only exposes me to more threats.
But let me ask you: how would everyone having access to my data improve the situation? I genuinely don't see the upside to that.
As someone who has been stalked, I absolutely disagree. It’s already a risk for me to own property or do other basic things, because it exposes my address in a public database.
This was demonstrated in the investigation into the January 6th riots. ICE is not the only part of the government using it, or something like it. Might be made seperately for each agency, more profitable that way.
If they are going to do this, they really ought to corroborate the face recognition with fingerprints. Many people have unrelated doppelgangers, even if an AI algorithm was near perfect: https://twinstrangers.net/
You can read all about USCBP policies on the use facial recognition
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy...
It would appear the software returns a lot of “potential matches” with propensity scores and demographic and recording information and it’s up to the agent to make the final determination.
It’s more a tool to find potential matches rather than a program that pops up and says “this is who this person is”
Identical twins are a thing as well.
Identical twins have different fingerprint patterns
As a former MAGA it's just mind boggling to watch all the supposedly freedom loving GOP base clamor for mass digital surveillance and gestapo immigration raids. These same tools and policies will just be used against them in the future. Makes me question democracy.
The news of Palantir database was pretty unpopular among the twitter right from what I've seen. If it came to a public vote I doubt "government builds giant surveillance system" would get wide support from anyone even if it was spun as anti-immigrant.
This is just something the type of people who end up in government try every year despite the fact few people want it.
Anti-immigrant? Maybe not. Anti-crime? I'm not so sure.
By “pretty unpopular” you mean lip service while they vote for the same cretins that are doing this next cycle.
No politician 100% aligns with everything you believe in.
I voted for Obama twice and he certainly disappointed in several ways. But voting for the other guy would have been more disappointing.
Imagine if we had more than two choices. I have no idea how to make that happen, but it seems like it needs to.
We have (many) more than two choices in most general elections (except for seats where state law involves something like California's "jungle primary", but then the primary is, not a "primary" in the usual sense (an election in which party nominees for the general election are chosen) but the first round of a two-round general election, where only the top two candidates from the first round advance to the second round.
What we tend to have is only two viable choices, and that's a consequence of using single-winner election with first-past-the-post voting; using multiwinner elections with a proportional election method (which doesn't have to be party-list proportional, candidate-centered ranked-ballots, multimember district systems like Single Transferrable Vote work fine for this) for legislative elections, and ranked-ballots single-winner elections for executive offices (but the first is more important than the second) can fix that (unfortunately, at the federal level, that takes people heavily invested in the system to vote to end it; which is unlikely to happen unless it becomes a matter of overwhelming public consensus, which it won't without being adopted at some level; however, in many states, it could be done for state elections through citizen processes without politicians voting it in.)
There is an effort to ban ranked choice voting at the state level. Already banned for Missouri¹ in the last election cycle.
1. https://missouriindependent.com/2024/11/05/missouri-voters-a...
We have three choices in Canada and it's basically the same thing. They pretended we were going to get more options last time but it turned out to be politically untenable for the powers at be.
In the Netherlands there are twenty parties that dit in Parliament
Still disappointment because they need to form a coalition. But that is what countries are: a group of people who despise eachother but have to work together because the alternative is even worse.
> As a former MAGA it's just mind boggling to watch all the supposedly freedom loving GOP base clamor for mass digital surveillance and gestapo immigration raids.
Both (sweeping away due process for mass deportation, and eliminating restrictions on law enforcement and surveillance in the name of “law and order” generally) were both major promises of Trump’s 2024 campaign and things that he made steps toward limited by institutional forces (courts, political resistance including in some cases from old-line Republicans, etc.), which Trump and the MAGA movement derided as deep state traitors, during his 2017-2021 term.
Kind of surprising to see someone who describes themselves as ex-MAGA who is surprised that the GOP under Trump supports these things.
> sweeping away due process for mass deportation…>
This is pretty off topic obviously but I see this due process claim a lot and I am assuming I’m missing some kind of fundamental legal concepts. And that wouldn’t be surprising because I have no legal background.
If a person is not a citizen, and they’ve overstayed whatever limit there is to staying while not being a citizen, and if the action taken is to remove the person from the country - what role does due process play?
Proof of citizenship seems like it should be a pretty cut and dried thing to determine. It shouldn’t require a court proceeding should it?
If the accusation was like theft or murder and/or the action taken was imprisonment or fines, that would be a different story.
But this is like being escorted out of a movie theater if you can’t present your ticket.
If ICE arrested you, would it be fair for them to deport you before you were able to present evidence that you're a citizen?
Due process doesn't mean a full trial. At its most fundamental level, it simply means having a fair process. Of course there's a whole set of case law behind determining what is fair, and a lot of that depends on the type and severity of the case.
But what happens if all that fairness and case law is ignored? Without due process (such as a hearing with a judge), how do you prove you're a citizen? Who do you even present your evidence to? How can you even gather your evidence if you're locked away in a cell?
When people argue for due process (which is a constitutional right), this is what they're arguing for. They're arguing that a single government employee should not be able to deport them without a fair process. Which is a constitutional right for all people (not just citizens), per the 14th amendment.
I think there are 3 fundamental misapprehensions that someone who thinks in abstract systems (like software) tends to make when considering about a human system (like the law).
1. The system doesn't make mistakes
2. The system represents the underlying reality
3. The system can be implemented
Let's see how that plays out here:
1. You're a US citizen. While returning from an overseas trip, a border agent thinks it's a bit weird that you have 3 laptops and flags you for extra screening. Unfortunately, the box for "extra screening" was right next to "fraudulent passport" and they checked the wrong one. You say you're a US citizen. The box says you aren't. No due process? Straight to gitmo.
2. You're in the US on a work visa sponsored by your benevolent megalithic software company. Unfortunately, they engage in some right-sizing by sizing you right out the door with zero notice. It's policy for immigration to retroactively extend your status if you find another sponsor or a different visa. But, on paper, the moment you were terminated you lost your legal status. And, just your luck, immigration agents are waiting outside as you carry your stuff to your car. No due process? Straight to gitmo.
3. You've never had a passport because you grew up in the US and have never travelled internationally. An immigration agent stops you and asks you for proof of your status. All you have is your old (pre-REAL ID) driver's license, but the agent says those are easily faked. Maybe you could go to your parents' house to look for your birth certificate, but the agent wants proof now. No due process? Straight to gitmo.
> on paper, the moment you were terminated you lost your legal status
That's not true. There's a 60 day grace period after your employment ends during which you still have your legal status: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/chapter-I/subchapter-B/...
My bad. Looks like that changed in 2017 and I had out of date information. I will say that "may eliminate or shorten this 60-day period as a matter of discretion" means the scenario is still just as plausible:
https://natlawreview.com/article/notices-appear-ntas-being-i...
4. A birth certificate is just a piece of paper. I'm pretty sure that is not enough, on it's own, to prove citizenship.
5. The new administration is seeking to deny the validity of birthright citizenship. The implication of that would be that you are now required to have one or more parent's birth certificates in addition to your own, and probably several other documents.
5a. How many people carry their birth certificate around with them? 5b. What happens if the ICE agent conveniently loses your papers? Ooops.
> If the accusation was like theft or murder and/or the action taken was imprisonment or fines, that would be a different story.
Detention of indefinite duration followed at some arbitrary time by removal, often to a country to which the subject has no previous connection, does not speak the language, and in which they have in some cases no access to the necessities of life (and in some cases where they are subsequently imprisoned in a prison that the operating government proudly claims “no one who goes in ever gets out” by agreement between the US government and the foreign country) is in no way less serious than imprisonment and fines (indeed, it often is literally imprisonment, and in some cases it has been a very swift death sentence.)
US Supreme court has ruled there is due process for illegal immigrants and reaffirmed it in various case law since immigration law became a thing over a century ago. The US was founded on natural rights principals which apply to every person in the country, not just citizens. The right to due process is not something congress can touch via new immigration laws even if they wanted (absent maybe a constitutional amendment).
They are entitled to exactly the same due process as anyone else charged with the same crime, but what the particular due process is for a particular crime or civil proceeding can be changed.
In so many words yes. The law you're being charged with can imply different procedures, but generally requires the same fundamental rights and also generally falls into some pretty broad buckets (civil, criminal, military, immigration, bankruptcy etc).
Immigration law demands they be given appropriate notice and opportunity to challenge it in front of a judge (+ appeals), but it doesn't give every person the right to something like a lengthy jury trial as in criminal law for example.
But all law ultimately involves tests of how reasonable is was, appropriate interpretations by judges, and it's chaotic nature will have failures over time that either needs to improved upon through legislative branch or be killed off by judicial branch as violating some higher rights like the constitution.
> Immigration law demands...
Exactly. And just like I said, this law can be changed by those who wrote it.
If by "those who wrote it" = multiple layers of government branches involving hundreds of different people at any one time and many thousands of real cases testing the law each year a under long slow moving history of precedence, under a set of hard limits of constitutional and administrative law, then yes, you could reduce it to that one sentence if you don't appreciate the nuance of law
If you moved to another country, and the police grabbed you on the street, would you like to have a hearing to find out why and dispute their findings before they shipped you away to Africa to never see your spouse and children again?
You need due process even for outsiders.
The government has to prove in court what they claim. That’s due process for deportation.
And to be blunt, immigration court is already played loose and fast by the government. It’s a civil proceeding, so the accused is not provided a lawyer for free. They don’t always make sure they explain what’s happening to the person in a language that they understand. So the government often gets what it wants when it goes to immigration court.
The Republicans not following the law is the point.
> They don’t always make sure they explain what’s happening to the person in a language that they understand.
FWIW ICE detention facilities and removal proceedings in immigration courts are required to provide translators by US law, at no cost. https://www.ice.gov/detain/language-access
The main issue with due process with the current admin is the time pressure they are putting on the detainee by flying them to another state and rushing the deportation, which makes access to time lawyers difficult. Which is something the Supreme Court has already taken issue with.
Ex-MAGA can range all the way back to 2016. You assumed 2024. I last voted in 2020. Not that it matters. But to clarify.
As MAGA likes to say - Promises made, promises kept
It makes me question all sorts of things when people get what they were promised and then complain they got it.
I haven’t seen any base “clamoring for mass digital surveillance”?
It’s either indifference (mostly due to ignorance) or outright opposition?
I don't know anyone clamoring for mass digital surveillance. Immigration raids perhaps.
When the founder of Palantir donates a ton of money -- as well as one of his acolytes to be the VP -- it would be more surprising if this DIDN'T happen. This is precisely the kind of thing the angry right wing would be up in arms about (maybe even literally) if it wasn't their side pushing for it.
The billionaire party owns both political parties; they shuffle the front-people to give the illusion of choice. In reality they get what they want. George Carlin spoke eloquently about this.
I believe strongly that most of this work has been done prior to the current president taking office.
What you say may be true and we will see what comes in the future, but dont for a moment believe that all these things are due to the current, nor that previous was fighting to stop it.
Many of the weapons now wielded by Trump (ICE, AUMF, DHS, Guantanamo, etc) were introduced under Bush II.
Exactly. Everyone screeching now should have listened to those weirdo civil liberties people 20yr ago.
You get the government you deserve.
I hope we can get this authoritarian phase over with quickly so that the people who actually made decisions, if only as minor as voting, can suffer for them rather than die peacefully leaving future generations to sort it out.
Given that the majority of Republicans and Democrats have kept these programs alive, one way or another, does not fill with much hope on that front. Or put differently, enough Republicans and Democrats to keep it alive.
Not in the future, these tools and policies are already used against everyone right now. Plenty of Trump supporters have already been arrested and/or deported by ICE.
Ya good point. Just because the tools haven't been used on me personally doesn't mean they aren't already being used. I assume they used for J6 riot.
I assume you are talking about Hispanic Trump supporters because ICE definitely hasn't deported your middle of America white Trump supporter.
I was actually thinking about this guy when I wrote that comment: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nh-green-card-holder-de...
And they still blame Biden/Obama/Hillary for it.
Peter Thiel must be doing Mr Burns laugh on this one
No... he'll do that if/when his acolyte steps up from VPOTUS to POTUS.
I keep trying to tell people that the US is over when JD Vance becomes POTUS next year because they will attempt to get him behind the desk before the election.
Why would they do that? And why would it be the end of the US?
JD Vance and Peter Thiel are followers of Curtis Yarvin who ultimately wants the end of democracy and freedom of speech to create a "CEO for America" who can make decrees at will. JD Vance is Thiel's protege and the reason JD Vance is VP is because of Thiel's support.
I had never heard of Curtis Yarvin... though his views aren't exactly novel or unique.
Whether they are novel or not isn't important. What is important is that he has the ear of the VPOTUS and the CEO of the largest private surveillance network.
Yeah they are … he’s really cooky in a narrow and specific way.
Frankly tried reading his stuff, and it becomes gibberish. At one point he calls his political philosophy Jacobitism, which was a real ideology at some point, but it bears no connection with anything else bearing the name.
He’s basically just repackaged Thomas Carlyle with some interesting personal anecdotes.
We all knew USA is just a Temu version of Chinese Communist Party