#ice-surveillance

#ice-surveillance

The agency is flush with cash; it now has a larger budget than the FBI. To the point that ICE has, in fact, acquired two mobile data-capture companies, including Penlink, a longtime Department of Homeland Security vendor. The company tracks and maps purchasable or scrapable data from data brokers, pictures or videos posted on social media and geo-fencing, to name a few. Penlink's tech can even delve into or extract info from someone's phone, such as contacts, calendar events, chat messages and more.

During a confrontation with ICE agents, two legal observers had their faces scanned by a federal officer to include in a vague database. "We have a nice little database, and now you're considered domestic terrorists," the ICE agent said at the time. It wasn't clear at the moment whether the agent was bluffing. But now, new details reported by CNN reveal that Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis was indeed closely tracked by a border agent system before his killing.

One among said programs is Alternatives to Detention (ATD), which since 2004 has served as a "more humane" option for lower risk individuals facing removal from the United States, allowing those in the program to wait for their court date at home rather than being stuffed into a detention facility. The trade off, of course, is intense surveillance from ICE, through monitoring devices exclusively provided and operated by BI Inc.

The initiative, part of a series of recent contracts with technology companies, seeks to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) ability to monitor people through their social media to levels that threaten to violate constitutional rights. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a solicitation seeking private companies to deploy at least 30 analysts to ICE monitoring centers in Williston, Vermont, near Canada, and in Santa Ana, California. The request is for a round-the-clock surveillance operation using the latest technology, including artificial intelligence, to support efforts to increase deportations.