ICE Building Social Media Surveillance Team to Hunt People Down
ICE may be watching your TikToks.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to build a 24/7 social media surveillance team in an effort to deport even more people. On Friday, Wired reported on planning documents showing that ICE is looking to hire 30 new private contractors to comb every major social media app to gain more info on where to stage their draconian, often violent raids.
Targeted platforms will include X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit, but more niche sites could be on the list as well. The program will be run out of two sites, The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center in Williston, Vermont, and the Pacific Enforcement Response Center in Santa Ana, California.
ICE—whose main surveillance database is made by data company Palantir and last year signed a $2 million contract with Israeli spyware company Paragon—may also use AI in its hunt, according to federal contracting records.
This is far from ICE’s first time engaging in dystopian levels of surveillance. But this 24-hour AI surveillance, adding to already present privacy issues in America, only points to this kind of program being used on citizens and noncitizens alike.
Read more at Wired.