The absolutely outrageous thing is that apparently they are instructed to ignore all other evidence of citizenship if that app says someone is not a citizen. So even if you have your birth certificate ready, doesn't matter.
This is completely lawless.
From the article:
> He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien.
I don't think it's a coincidence that identity masking of deputies starts happening the moment that deputies start doing illegal things. They are jumping to the very end of "what can we do if we remove every means of accountability, present or future?"
Its not just ICE, its clear Trump intent for law enforcement (and not just federal) from even very early on in his first term, where a highlighted priority was terminating then-active federal enforcement actions against state law enforcement agencies for violations of civil rights. Lawless “law enforcement” has been one of the most consistent overt priorities Trump has had.
Yes, but ICE has been fast and loose with the law for a long time so they’re starting without something like the military’s culture about lawful orders, appropriate use of force, etc. As in so many areas, past presidents ignoring the problem left it ready for scaled up abuse.
ICE leadership below the top level is currently being purged, and apparently replaced with officials transferred from Border Patrol, because ICE’s approach and culture is more targeted and criminality based, and many of the biggest abuses so far in the immigration crackdown blamed on “ICE” have actually been carried out by Border Patrol (its not a coincidence that much of the current controversy in Chicago centers around thhe regional Border Patrol commander.)
While ICE is being massively scaled up with the intent that you describe, its not unique in kind or even the worst by degree of the agencies involved in terms of either historic or current lawlessness. It's just the one with the public mission most in line with the propaganda cover chosen for Trump's totalitarian efforts.
I think ICE's expansion + their massive legal discretion that goes beyond typical law enforcement is just he perfect place to put thugs. ICE by design is just the spot to have those folks, sadly.
Biometrics are more protected in IL than an other states as well. Facebook settled a big lawsuit just for automatically tagging people (actually the suit was about storing the biometric face data at all without consent)
They are. BIPA is top rate. I looked at the statute, which excludes Illinois state and local government entities, but does not talk of federal bodies. I don't know enough about the supremacy of federal statutes to know how that works, and most discussions note that the statute excludes "the government" which is not totally accurate.
Legal action against this is going to be a tough, possibly unfeasable battle.
Whatever the laws are, they probably contain exceptions for the use of biometrics for law enforcement purposes.
In terms of court precedent, biometrics are not protected by the 4th amendment, because your face is not considered a secret that the government could compel you to reveal.
The supreme court has effectively removed all of the possible mechanisms to sue ICE or DHS and hold them accountable, with the sole exception of having the DOJ prosecute them on your behalf, which is of course never going to happen. The only remaining possibility to hold them accountable for crimes appears to be within the states judicial systems- but most are currently setup to not allow this, deferring to the federal mechanisms which only very recently stopped existing.
Question for a future (2026?) dystopia: if our faces aren't secret or private for 4A/5A purposes, can we start making them secret/private by walking around in public with a balaclava?
We now know why people had such weird makeup/facial modification attachments in dystopian sci-fi.
Luckily we have libertarians, 1990s Republicans, and Hannity and Infowars fans that will fight vehemently to stop this sort of face scanning. It is all of theirs' nightmare scenarios way past all their red lines up there with Walmarts turned into relocation camps.
But until they sort it out is it possible to make temporary tattoos (or just stickers) with patterns that make facial scanning unfeasible?
It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore.
Theres also a bunch of of digital camo, most seem to target IR cameras [1] here's a homebrew version.
> It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore.
I fed all the CV Dazzle demo pictures into some free Amazon facial recognition demo a few years ago. It was a pretty shitty demo, but the makeup didn't even slow it down. It had no trouble at all finding the faces, assigning ages or genders, or locating facial features. And once you've located the features, you're going to have no trouble identifying the person if they're in the database.
Agreed there are definitely a lot of Libertarians and Republicans that definitely object to random use of facial recognition as presented.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE/DoJ on this before jumping to conclusions as framing often cuts off portions of video or otherwise warps framing of events. Not to mention, I don't recall seeing any mention of a request for comment in the article.
The Netherlands has a law that makes it illegal to cover your face. Officially this is to help the police but its also a great tool against religion. Constitution>god
Beyond this, state law may not supersede federal authority. This will likely go to the Supreme Court before it's actually decided, short of congressional action (unlikely).
I'm not sure if these requests are only made if other ID isn't available or a refusal to present id happens. That said, I'm not sure how this qualifies as reasonable suspicion in terms of stopping someone without evidence of some other crime in progress or as part of a warranted raid activity. Though stops on highways within 100 miles of a border is very much permitted for identification, unsure if this would fall under those provisions.
While I absolutely support deportations, this appears at first glance to be over the top... but I'd like to see any clarifying statements from ICE, which I don't recall seeing in the article.
Also, this app uses photos from a combination of government databases, but there are millions of citizens without photo ID who won't show up in any of them.
I think the scientific consensus is that they are NOT unique. I seem to recall there’s something like a one in five million chance of collision. (Recalling from memory so please verify, I recall thinking that in a large city there’s likely to be another person who’s fingerprints could be mistaken for yours)
IIRC, someone was accused and arrested for murder who lived across the country and couldn't have possibly committed the crime based on fingerprint match.
My friend (who has an identical twin) was joking about scanning himself into Cameo mode on Sora and making some goofy videos and saying they were his brother.
I'd say it's nice to see that particular demographic at the business end of this 1984 crap since they're usually the ones pushing it but I don't think the rest of them are smart enough to have the "that could be me" reaction.
It is often the case that a "good" word is used, and then the derogatory secondary meanings grow.
Years ago special needs was a fairly safe term, yet now "speshul" definitely has different tone. I'm sure you know if many other examples (I can think of heaps). I predict that "delayed" will become derogatory.
I think that banning words is literally dumb. I am bit older and went through the Politically Correct putsh. Disclaimer: I'm a lefty.
Birth certificates and driver's licenses can be and are routinely faked by everyone from high school students to foreign agents. Faces cannot be faked.
You're making the unreasonable assumption of good faith on the part of the app developers.
It could be designed to accurately distinguish citizens from noncitizens, or it could be connected to a database of online agitators, or picking out facial features of targeted minorities without regard to their personal identity, or some combination of all of these and worse. You don't know.
Faces can’t be easily be “faked” in person but they can definitely be misrecognized or recognized correctly against mistagged data. Anything like this needs to be designed with the assumption that errors will be frequent enough that the finding has to be validated before doing something serious.
This is completely lawless.
From the article:
> He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien.