Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Os Voloshan here with Cara Price High as Hi Cara. So we've talked on the show a fair bit about facial recognition technology and the ubiquity of data scraping by private companies. It does sometimes feel a bit like we are living in a kind of science fiction movie about the population of people who are being technologically surveiled.
I think the movie is called Minority Report, and we live in it right now.
And over the past few months, it's become impossible to ignore how government agencies are partnering with private companies to help in the efforts to do mass deportations.
Yeah, it's very disconcerting to read about how government agencies are using facial recognition technology to detain deput tees.
Yeah, and it's not just facial recognition. We'll get into all the different technologies that are being used today with our friend Joseph Cox from four oho form Media. The amount of data that immigration and customs enforcement can scrape
and utilize is pretty mind blowing. And on the other side of it, people have developed products to help track ice activity, but those products and apps have been removed from the Apple App Store, and also I think from the Android app stores, which limits how much people are able to use these tools.
You know, how private tech companies are responding to ICE does put a spotlight on the relationship between Silicon Valley and this presidential administration.
Joseph said, it's really astonishing what a different environment it is now versus the first Trump administration in that respect, which we'll get into but without further ado, here's my conversation with Joseph Cox. Thanks for joining us today.
Joseph, yeah, absolutely, thank you for having me.
So I've got to be questions what's going on with ICE in technology and how worried should we all be about what's going on?
So ICE is buying essentially every surveillance technology available under the sun. A very brief overview is facial recognition technology, social media surveillance, phone location data, spyware for hacking into phones remotely fake cell phone towers as well, if you can imagine it, and if a law enforcement agency has had it before in the US, ICE has almost certainly this point purchased it or adapted it, or is at
least thinking about buying it. As for your second question, we actually just published an article today about ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials using a facial recognition app in the field on people that stops to verify their citizenship. And a lawmaker who's also been following the issue told me that ICE believes a result from this app can override a birth certificate in determining whether someone is a
citizen of the United States or not. That is obviously incredibly alarming that you're going to take the results from a piece of technology and you're going to trust that and a notoriously inaccurate technology sometimes, and you're going to trust that over the piece of paper that says that somebody is a US citizen.
What is the reliability of facial recognition software today?
So I don't know about this specific technology it's called Mobile Fortify, but broadly, over the years, as companies and governments have been deploying and developing facial recognition technology, we've seen there are racial biases. Often because the data sets of all of these photos of faces used to train the AI or the machine learning algorithms, they don't have as many black people or brown people in them, so they can actually be very inaccurate at directly identifying people.
We've seen a ton of coverage in the New York Times, for example, where people have been arrested by mistake because they believe one black man is actually another one based on the facial recognition technology. Again, I don't know the accuracy of this specific tool that ICE is using. They all do vary, but this bias, and especially racial bias, has been our longstanding criticism of facial recognition over the past five, six, even ten years.
I want to get in start of the specific tools, Joseph, but before we get there, I actually several years ago hosted a podcast on a very different topic, which was called Forgotten Women at Fuarez, and it was about the femicides and murders of women on the Texas Mexico border. And one of the interesting things that came out of spending time there was how everyone on the US side of the border talks about the twenty five miles inland from the border as this kind of zone where the
law that govern law enforcement don't really apply. There's all these kind of special exceptions for border enforcement and stuff, and that therefore that area became a kind of early testing ground for both actions that might be considered extra judicial, but also for technologies that the wider population wouldn't accept
if they were deployed on the wider population. Are we now seeing the metastasis of the border area and the technology used to surveil it and control it across the whole country?
Yeah, I think absolutely. I think a concrete example would be the use of surveillance drones. Many people will associate these very large predator drones with the US War on terror, firing health fire missiles in the Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, that sort of thing. Those same drones or be unarmed have been surveiling the US Mexico border and the Canadian border
as well for years and years and years. What happened now more regularly and more frequently is that DHS will fly those same high powered surveillance drones again that were designed for war zones above US cities. The most recent example of that was the La anti Ice protests and DHS flew those same drones above the city. They even
published some of the footage in social media posts. And we see it in all sorts of different technology as well, maybe downloading the contents of your phone, which is very easy at a border where people have fewer rights obviously because they're crossing a border or entering or leaving. We're
absolutely going to see that sort of thing proliferating. And that's one of the main worries from the surveillance experts I speak to, is this trickle down effect of well, this technology starts in an immigration context, then it goes to domestic immigration enforcement, and then it ends up with local cops or local sheriff's office.
Or you hear Trump talking about having the military practiced on pops in sanctuary cities. Makes me think of Anderil, the weapons manufacturer who are doing all these drones and autonomous weapons that are being exported to Taiwan in preparation for a potential conflict there. But I believe that Anderil back in twenty sixteen developed a lot of these technologies, these weapons of wars, again starting off with border contracts.
So this intersection of the tech the military and using military methods to control domestic populations, I mean, as just a set of ideas, it's quite terrifying.
Yeah, Andreill runs these AI powered towers all across the US Mexico border and the US Canadian border as well. They're capable of all sorts of things like AI object recognition, tracking people, tracking vehicles, alerting DHS officials, all of that sort of thing. And there is just a big shift now in Silicon Valley in the tech companies where they are more explicitly going to work with the government. Whereas before Facebook, Instagram, Meta, Twitter or whoever uber, they were
very much separate from the government. We're making consumer goods, We're making an app for whatever reason. Tech companies today are not only leaning into they're very proud to work with the government. And Andrew has been a leader in that, And obviously other examples would be palanted, for example, where these companies say, this is our purpose is to protect
the United States. Now, of course, how people understand what protecting the United States might actually be is obviously going to vary, especially when we talk about surveillance technology and how that's being used and who is being used against.
You mentioned facial recognition. Clearview AI always seems to come up sort of as the big batter wolf of this topic area. Can you explain a bit about how that technology or that company is being used by or partnered with, the government.
Yes, so we just revealed that I paid clearview AI another five million dollars for access to its technology. Ice has been contracting with Clearview for years. It's something of the established player in the government or law enforcement facial recognition space. What Clearview did several years ago was basically scrape a ton of photos of people's faces from the World Wide Web, so they're then no profiles, are social
media profiles. And they made this massive database which is now something like ten billion images, and they allowed people to upload a photo and we will then show you similar photos, probably of the same person, and you can then figure out who this person is. And when it was revealed by The New York Times several years ago, that was really crossing the line, like Facebook could have done this, and although they had facial recognition technology, it was to tag people, you know, when you tag your
friends and your photos. It wasn't to unmask strangers. Google could have done it. They said, this is two dangerous, we don't want to Clearview cross that line. And incredibly controversial all the time, still controversial now, but it's almost normal now. There are Clearview contracts every single day essentially where local cops are already using that, sheriff's offices are or using that, and ICE is absolutely using it as well.
With this latest contract. Ice spent this five million dollars in part because it believes it can use facial recognition technology to unmask the people that it believes are quote, assaulting officers.
So that's facial recognition. There's also location tracking. Talk about flock.
Flock is an interesting company. A lot of people may have actually heard about it because it is proliferated around local communities. And what they do is they sell these cameras to police departments or homeowner associations or neighborhoods or city governments or whatever. And these cameras they sit stationary at the road and they continuously scan every vehicle that goes by. That will be the model of the car, the brand, the color, and most importantly the license plate.
And this creates this vast surveillance network that law enforcement officers can tap into without a warrant. Typically you enter xyz license plate, it shows you all the locations this vehicle has been and.
Do you have to be law enforce where anyone can use this?
If your homeowners association, it's going to be the authorized user of that particular homeowners association or that neighborhood or something. It's similar to a ring camera. In a way, but you're not going to be able to access all of the data.
I couldn't if I was a stalker and know my ex's number plate and therefore track them around the country as an individual person. But as a member of law enforcement, I could.
Yes. Essentially yes, and law enforcement have access to this sort of additional capability, which is the National Lookup Tool, where a cop, say in Texas, can search cameras in Illinois or California. And that's not even a hypothetic example. We actually reported that a law enforcement office in Texas searched for a woman who self administered an abortion, and it searched cameras all over the country, and crucially, we found cops were performing lookups for ICE in this tool.
We got these spreadsheets has said all the reasons why, and you scroll through them and some just say ICE, some say immigration or immigration enforcement. Immigration protest was another one as well, and that was already rarely interesting enough, and Flock made serious changes after we revealed that, But we then also learned that ICE actually had direct access
as well. They didn't even have to go through the cops, and that's apparently stopped now, But ICE were getting access to that system through a side door via local police, but then also just direct access as well, so you've.
Got facial rehognition, license plate tracking, and then we have this sort of system that sits even above, which is the investigative case management you mentioned Palentier earlier. This is this a Palentier product.
So it started as DHS project and it's basically a centralized database and you look into it and you can look up a person that is their name, social Security number, maybe identifying features like tattoos or scars, that sort of thing. Palenteer then started work on that, and this was years and years ago. They've been doing this for something like
ten years at this point. But then with the second Trump administration, something changed and it became clear that ICE and DHS more broadly needed this tool to be a bit more powerful, which is where they brought in Palenteer to actually take over the development, not just the maintenance, of this project. And that's how we come to immigration OS, which, according to material I got leaked from inside Palenteer, is designed to make it much easier to find the physical
location of aliens. Of course, the US government's terms for immigrants essentially we don't know all of the different data that's going into this system alan to their entire the entire purpose of their existence is to match together all of this different sorts of data from all over the place and make it intelligible and readable for government customers.
So we can assume that Immigration OS is probably bringing data from all over the place into an interface that ICE or DHS can use to I mean, essentially track down people at least recording some TIRA.
I got interesting. One of my dear friends and board members at Kaleidoscope is a man called Stuart Carl who's a First Amendment lawyer. He was actually the general counselor for the Wall Street Journal for many years, and now he teaches at Columbia Journalism School, and he advised students basically to avoid posting on social media who are not US citizens about political matters at least until after they graduate.
I think his point was get your degree that you've come for, and then decide where you want to draw your line. He got a lot of blowback for that, and there was debate and a York Time story about it. But this idea of second guessing what you post on social media in the current political environment, I mean, how programmatic is social media scrapian analysis versus opportunistic when they already want to build a case against somebody.
Yeah, they do it in several different ways, but broadly, you have right wing agitators who are constantly going through social media Twitter, Instagram. Whatever they see something they don't like, they flag it to the administration. And we have several very high profile right wing social media personalities who are clearly doing that, and they're emitting as much on their
own social media. The other side are these technological tools which ICE has, Customs and Border Protection has, and the State Department I believe has as well, and these are broadly speaking AI powers. They say they can make decisions or inferences based on somebody's profile, what they've posted, the location they've done it from, and all of that sort of thing. Again, already a black box. We're also trying to look at a black box from the outside, so
it's doubly opaque about what is actually going on. But what we do know is that these government agencies SUS spend millions and millions of dollars on social media surveillance tools. We just don't know exactly how it goes from post to visa being taken away. But the threat is absolutely there that if you say something that the administration does not agree with, there's every chance that some sort of pretense will be used to revoke you your immigration status.
You know. As this sort of ice crisis royals the country. There are certain courts that are fighting back. I mean recently in Chicago, one of the judges basically hauled in the local head of border patrol and said, you know, you have to come and report to me every single day at six pm and what you're doing. You can't throw tear gas into crowds where children are about to arrive with the warning, etc.
Etc.
And essentially kind of insisted on some kind of role for judiciary in managing the behavior or the illegal behavior or the potentially illegal behavior of some officials. How's that playing out in the tech realm, That's a.
Very good question, actually, Yeah. And with the court stuff, obviously, that is the American system working as intenders, where you have all of these different branches of government and all of these other things, like the courts, and they provide these checks and balances. That doesn't exist really for the private surveillance tech social media industry. We have had impact
through our reporting. Again, our reporting or FLOCK ended up with the company removing California, Illinois, and I think a couple more states from its National Lookup TOL, meaning ICE can no longer access those through the police, and then FLOCK also stopped. It's more direct sharing with ICE and Customs and Border Protection as well. There has been some pressure from Democrats on House committees looking into the facial
recognition side as well after our reporting. That being said, accountability looks very very different in the second of Trump administration, where you have masked agents, you have officials physically assaulting people in the corridors of court rooms in New York and then two days later they're back at work. Accountability looks very very different here. And for the tech stuff,
the accountability comes from the outside. It's not really from government, because of course the government wants to work for these companies. It can come from inside where people are clearly annoyed inside Pale or Flock and then they'll provide information to me. But it looks very very different to as you say, taking a senior official in front of a judge and having him report every day. It's just a completely different environment.
After the break the people fighting back against the ICE surveillance state stay with us. There is also resistance tech. I'm very curious to hear about ice block. I mean, our producer Eliza made an interesting point that, you know, after the California fires, there was this great interest in funding fire watching apps and early warning systems, and there's also an explosion of apps around helping communities avoid ice round apps and stuff that it will be fair, they
didn't receive the same funding attention. Talk a little bit about these apps and the resistance to them.
Yeah, so ice block is the most prominent one. It was launched earlier this year. People only really started to pay attention in around June when CNN covered the app. And all ice block does is it allows people to report sightings of ICE officials in their local proximity. It uses the location data off your iPhone. It was only on iPhone. It wasn't on Android for privacy reasons, is
what the developer told me. And if you see an ICE official or some sort of ICE raid within five miles of you or whatever, you can report it and then other people around the area will receive a push alert. It's rarely similar to ring the neighborhood app or even a citizen or something like that. All the fire watching apps you mentioned as well. Time goes on. The DOJ does not like that CNN has reported this and amplified it. The DOJ even says it's trying to find a way
to charge CNN. Obviously that didn't come to anything at least yet. But fast forward to September and there is a horrible shooting at an ICE facility where a gunman shoots at the facility and he hits free detainees. I believe two died and one survived. When authorities looking to that person, they look at his phone and they find that that person was searching for ice spotting apps explicitly
ice block. The DOJ and Pambondi, the Attorney General then uses that as a justification to go to Apple and say, look, you have to remove this app. This is encouraging violence against ICE officials. Putting aside the fact that obviously ICE officials are going to be an ICE facility, I don't think you need an app to determine that. But Apple gives in and it removes not just that app, but a host of other ones at the explicit request of
the US Department of Justice. Now Apple removes and Google removes apps every single day for doing sketchy or weird or misleading stuff. It is an entirely different thing for the US government to go and say remove this app, especially when that app was actually facilitating First Amendment protected speech as well. This is not illegal to report where law enforcement are. That's a core tenant of the First Amendment.
Yeah, it's kind of extraordinary. I want to help people look back on this time. I mean, obviously, people who are rich and powerful like getting richer and more powerful. But the capitulation every step of the way of private companies, especially tech companies, to these requests and mandates, it's quite extraordinary. I wonder how it will be judged by history.
Yeah. I remember in the first Trump administration, I feel like there was so much more pushback from tech companies, you know, even surveillance companies as well. I think Amazon stopped selling its facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies for a period of time as well. That has completely gone Now. It is absolute capitulation to the government. It is doing whatever they want. It is not really pushing back.
I mean Apple removes that app. You know, a few weeks earlier or whatever it was, Tim Cook was giving Trump a golden statue of the Apple logo or whatever. Another example is that DHS right now is using a lot of memes from the Halo video game franchise which are dehumanizing immigrants and basically comparing them to like an alien parasite. Microsoft hasn't responded to that. Microsoft hasn't, you know,
asked them to take it down. It's an entirely different environment now than it was in the first Trump administration where it comes to tech and even just business right and private companies.
So who's fighting back? I mean, there's Joshua Aaron who founded the ice block app. Where is their resistance to this? And also what the normal people do in their daily lives to protect themselves from the reach of some of these technologies and keep themselves safe.
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of different things people are doing. There are other apps similar to ice Block. There was one called eyes up. There was just cataloging videos of ice abuses. I wasn't even tracking the physical location of people. That developer who he only gave me his first name, Mark, but he's doing work in his own way.
There.
You even have states like New York State is basically building it's equivalent of that, which is, hey, if you have videos of abuses by ICE, send them to us, Like there will be consequences for this later. So people right now are thinking about, well, how do we collect
evidence for accountability later? Like it can't happen now. There's no real way to hold a ICE agent who maybe detains a US citizen unlawfully to account because they're masks, and there's this complete culture of we're just going to do whatever we want. But people are preparing for that.
As for the second part of your questions and what people can do to protect their privacy, I mean, it really depends on the technology, but I would sort of suggest some of the normal stuff when it comes to tracking mobile phones, which is, keep the phone fully up to date, uninstall sketchy apps, don't give location permissions. Of course, there's lots more you could do, and it's going to
depend upon your individe your use case. So you a lawyer defending immigrants, so you're a journalist, are you an activists whatever? So people should do their own research. But there are things that people can do if they think it's appropriate.
Joseph thank you, Thank you so much.
That's it for this week for tech Stuff.
I'm Cara Price and I'm os Vlocian. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Cara Price, Julia Nutter, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidisco and Katrina nor velve iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed this up. Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
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