How far will ICE go? Already singled out for its brutal operations and its desire to monitor social media 24/7, the authority has once again exceeded its limits… in its own way.
Videos posted on social media show US immigration agents using facial recognition tools on smartphones to identify people during checkpoints, sometimes without apparent justification. In one of the recordings filmed in Chicago, an agent scans the face of a young man on a bicycle who claims to be an American citizen.
In another video, a driver is asked to remove his cap to “speed up control.” These now frequent scenes illustrate a new era in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) enforcement practices.
According to the investigation by the American media 404 Media, agents use an internal application called “Mobile Fortify”, capable of analyzing an individual’s face and comparing it with a database of 200 million images from the FBI, the State Department and other agencies.
The app can also cross-search for vehicles, phones, addresses, and even weapons. “It appears that ICE has started using real-time facial recognition in the field,” Allison McDonald, a researcher at Boston University, tells 404.
A technological drift?
This increase in power worries civil liberties advocates. “We should have banned this technology when there was still time,” warns Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, highlighting its intrusive and discriminatory potential.
According to several experts, the technology reinforces racial profiling practices already criticized by ICE, while creating a significant risk of errors that could lead to abusive arrests of US citizens.
Authorities remain opaque about the extent of this use. The Department of Homeland Security refuses to confirm or deny the capabilities of “Mobile Fortify,” while CBP acknowledges relying on “various technological tools to improve agent effectiveness.”
For Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, this request constitutes “a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE”, recalling that biometric matches are sometimes considered “definitive”, even compared to a birth certificate. For human rights organizations, this technological drift marks a worrying step towards unlimited state surveillance, where “our faces become identity documents that the government can read at any time.”
Source: BFM TV
