Posted on by

America Has Always Had Dangerous Surveillance Tools. ICE is Using them All without Precautions

Reading Time: 18 minutes.

A zine on "How to Report ICE"An ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, killed Renée Good a few weeks ago. Her final words to her killer seem to have been, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” In a video that would eventually come out, a voice that may have been Ross’ is heard calling her a, “Fucking bitch,” just moments after Ross shot her multiple times in the face. As we’ve been able to piece together from videos of the shooting, she had been allowing agents to drive past her and was now turning away from them to drive away before she was shot in the face multiple times and then refused immediate care. She died minutes after the shooting. After Good’s wife mocked the agent, who had pulled out his cellphone to record them, he switched his phone to his left hand, seemingly to draw his gun with his right. No violence had happened yet, even by the most right-wing propagandist’s viewpoint, but he had just been mocked. The incident reminded Americans that ICE agents will kill us at the slightest provocation, and we will be framed as the enemy of the state afterwards no matter how kind our final moments were. The protests it kicked off are ongoing.

Just a short time later, it happened again. This time to Alex Pretti, killed for trying to help a woman who was shoved by an ICE officer stand back up, all while Pretti was being pepper sprayed. He was tackled to the ground and shot, multiple times. Despite the killing being filmed from multiple angles, the government claimed his cellphone was a gun and his aid to a fallen woman was violence. He was an intensive care nurse at the VA hospital who ICE killed while he was helping someone.

This comes amid news of ICE expanding their data collection tools. We know ICE will detain and even kill U.S. citizens, possibly manufacturing cause after the event. What you may not know is just how far they’ll go to collect data on everyone, including United States citizens, possibly in violation of our 4th amendment rights.

An agency blankets this country that uses violence and justifies it later is also tracking us in our neighborhoods, scans our faces during interactions, and may even kill or detain us despite no evidence it’s necessary. It’s scary to be an American right now, but we know a few ways ICE is tracking us now. Knowing what Americans are up against will help you craft calls to your representatives to put an end to these practices and maybe even protect yourself.

Scanned and Stored, Without Consent

“In the United States, we should be free to go about our business without government agents scanning our faces, accessing our personal information, saving our photos for years, and putting us at risk of misidentifications and wrongful detentions. ICE and CBP’s use of Mobile Fortify on the streets of America should end immediately.”

– Nathan Freed Wessler of the ACLU to 404 Media

According to investigations by 404 Media, ICE is reportedly using a facial recognition service called Mobile Fortify in the field. This allows agents to point their phone at a subject and run facial recognition on them, getting information like their immigration status and identity. The scans, regardless of whether or not the subject is a citizen, are stored for 15 years.

Mobile Fortify has a collection of around 200 million images, most from government sources, like the State Department, CBP, or FBI. Mobile Fortify can report to ICE agents if they can place someone under arrest, and agents are, according to House Homeland Security Committee ranking member Bennie G. Thompson, told to trust the outcome of the facial recognition AI over actual trusted documentation, such as birth certificates or state IDs and social security cards. The results are “definitive,” they say. However, ICE, as well as the tools they use, make mistakes, meaning you could be in danger any time an ICE agent points his phone at you.

And you can’t refuse the scan.

“The growing use of face recognition by ICE shows us two things: that we should have banned government use of face recognition when we had the chance because it is dangerous, invasive, and an inherent threat to civil liberties and that any remaining pretense that ICE is harassing and surveilling people in any kind of ‘precise’ way should be left in the dust.”

-Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the EFF, to 404media

Lawmakers have called the scanning tech, and lack of consent in the scanning process, unconstitutional. You’d think because it seems to be a search without consent or reasonable suspicion—beyond ICE’s normal racism, however, lawmakers point out that facial scanning and surveillance discourages free speech. The threat of being added to a database for at least 15 years, and a scan that may or may not be accurate, discourages peaceful public participation. It’s a deterrent to our free speech, forced on us by the government, and could be a violation of our first amendment rights.

Lawmakers also raised other concerns. For example, going off the requests lawmakers have made, Mobile Fortify seemingly has not gone through required privacy impact testing for any government tool. ICE seemingly hasn’t responded to the lawmaker’s letter with any measurable action, which was sent in mid-2025. Lawmakers also wanted to know exactly how Mobile Fortify was used, how it’s been tested, how data is stored, or if ICE would be willing to stop using the technology. But, to ICE’s credit, Democrats don’t do more than send tersely worded letters, so why would they feel the need to respond to the inquest? The Democrats in question have not pushed ICE further and the party position still is not abolishment of ICE.

For us, there’s a fear of what this data could be used for. In one interaction with ICE, an ICE agent pointed their camera at them and was told they were recorded to be put on a list of “domestic terrorists.” In another interaction with ICE, Renée Good was shot by an officer in her face multiple times after he pointed his camera at her and her wife and decided to record a video.

No one wants ICE pointing anything at them.

Cuffed and Scanned

Jesus Gutiérrez was walking home from the gym one day when a Cadillac SUV with no license plates pulled up to him. Gutiérrez is a U.S. citizen, and he told the agents this. U.S. citizens legally do not need to carry ID except in circumstances that could require it, such as travel, driving, entering age-restricted environments. They do not need to carry paperwork while simply being outside of their homes.

ICE has sued to allow racial profiling and our extremely right-leaning courts are allowing it. So, despite his right not to present an ID for the “crime” of walking while Hispanic, ICE stopped Gutiérrez and gave him the ol’ fascism favorite, “papers please.” He only had his gym bag and phone, no ID. Instead of letting him go, ICE detained him. Handcuffed him and threw him into the car. Eventually, one of them scanned his face and found that he was a citizen. They let him go. Gutiérrez described it as being “kidnapped.” ICE took a U.S. citizen and, against his will and contrary to his rights, restrained and detained him for an hour. I think he had an apt description.

What normally would happen in this situation? This situation wouldn’t normally happen. We don’t typically have roving gangs of masked paramilitary forces scooping up everyone who has skin a few shades darker than ICE agents would like and forcing them to show their papers or be detained anyway. Without the facial scan, they may have simply had to let him go, no proof to detain him. Instead, they had reason to detain him, the results of a scan being pending, and now his face is scanned in a database that will keep record of him, and the harassment he faced, for 15 years or more.

Facial Recognition has Racial Bias

Before generative AI started invading every aspect of our lives, forced into our homes by companies investing in each other to keep the AI bubble from popping, stealing our art and labor in poor attempts to replace us, the most frequent AI stories came in the form of news of racist facial recognition. It was bad enough that AI giant Microsoft had called for laws regulating facial recognition. In fact, ICE had previously used facial recognition and nearly deported at least one U.S. citizen due to the false positives it produces. These false positives are far more likely on people with dark skin tones, the exact people ICE targets.

You can find plenty of examples of facial recognition preserving racial biases. From a girl who was kicked out of a roller rink to false arrests, multiple times. Facial recognition is highly flawed. It’s even less accurate with women. ICE pushed for the “right” to racially discriminate, and the people they’re targeting are the exact people facial recognition produces false positives for. If their goal was immigration enforcement, they’d care more about legal documentation than this flawed process that may produce racist outcomes. But if they’re just trying to harass Hispanic people, then they’re using the right methodology.

“ICE has treated Mobile Fortify like it’s a 100% accurate record retrieval system of everybody’s immigration status for the entire population of the U.S. when this is obviously not true, and could never be true from a technical perspective.”

– Cooper Quintin, senior public interest technologist at the EFF, speaking to 404 Media

In the field, Mobile Fortify may have issues. 404 Media found a case that includes testimony from a Customs and Border Protection agent who claims that the Mobile Fortify app failed to correctly identify someone they had detained. They performed two scans, but both seemed off. The person looked similar, but different enough from the scans that they couldn’t be sure which was correct. According to the lawyer representing the subject of these scans, neither scan was correct.

We don’t know if Mobile Fortify has the same racist tendencies as the facial recognition that came before it because ICE hasn’t released any results of testing, any updates it may have gone through since they’ve been in using it the field, whether or not it went through privacy screening as required, or any other information lawmakers have requested. We know they’re trusting it more than the far more reliable proof of citizenship or legal residency: documentation. What does that tell us about their motivations?

Crawling the Web to ID and Spy on You

You ever realize just how bad the internet is these days? Well, I suppose I have to clarify, it’s bad in so many ways. But perhaps you were thinking of buying a Christmas present for your mom. Perhaps you thought she should ditch that old Magic Mouse and get something ergonomic that won’t turn her wrist bones into powder. You search a little for ergonomic mice and, boom, now you can’t stop seeing Logitech and other mice ads on your Instagram feed.

I prefer trackballs anyway!

That’s thanks to a few things. You’re being tracked across the web. You search for something, you end up handing data over to whatever pages you land on, if the search engine itself isn’t tracking you (mine, Kagi, does not). They build a unique profile for you. Using data from other advertisers, other companies collecting this data, they can get an incredibly accurate idea of who you are. Even if they can’t always get your precise identity, they know your device and can track you across apps you use. Getting your identity out of that is easy, but for their purposes, not necessary. After all, they just have to know how likely it is that you can be swayed into buying something.

Imagine the average person has about a 10% chance of buying a new mouse. By searching for ergonomic mice for my mom, I ended up driving up the chance I would buy a mouse to something closer to 50%. Logitech and every advertiser’s ears just perked up. So when Meta sees me scrolling on Instagram, their algorithm tells the advertising pool that they have a person with a 50% chance of buying a mouse. Might be a 20% chance of buying a keyboard, 40% chance of buying a game, and so on. Advertisers like Logitech set a range for how much they’d be willing to pay to get that ad space. For someone with a high chance of buying their product, they’re willing to pay more to get that ad in front of you because you’ll be more likely to buy. That greater chance of a return on investment makes the ad space more lucrative to them than someone selling a subscription to men’s sexual performance pills to me. So, Logitech gets the ad over the one that has a 0% chance of advertising to me, and I get to hear about their cool new mouse every few stories I scroll through.

This is an incredibly simple description of something called “real time bidding.” Real time bidding allows advertisers to figure out if they are willing to pay more for a particular ad based on the metadata of the individual scrolling.

Maybe you already saw the problem here. There’s a unique ID for me, and a profile built up on me that can tell advertisers my interests, demographics, location, and more to convince them to advertise to me. You can build a profile on someone using their social media, shopping history, location, buying habits, number of people in their household, gender, sexuality, race, income, and so many more variables. Those variables are all unique to you. They identify you. While advertisers couldn’t care less about that information, someone who is scraping data to stalk you would be very interested in getting that information. So they build out advertiser profiles that collect that metadata and work to connect it to your identity. Now your digital stalker knows everything there is to know about you. They could do that for everyone online and sell that data to anyone, even state governments where the law allows it.

And that’s basically what is happening in the United States, according to further reporting done by 404 Media (seriously, they’re great). However, it’s actually worse than that in practice. That’s just one of the methods companies that sell your data use to ID you and track you everywhere you go. There are far more methods in play. Google has been using your location history to predict where you’ll be at any time of day. Anyone with access to cellular data has similar information, and cellular companies frequently sell that data to increase their profits. It’s sold for advertising purposes, but an entire surveillance industry has been built up on using advertising data to spy on U.S. citizens without the need for a warrant.

“The Federal Trade Commission made clear in multiple settlements that selling location data from apps and online ads—including to the government—is a violation of federal law unless users receive clear notice and consent to selling their data to the government. But now that the FTC is effectively a wing of the White House, data brokers have continued to sell data to ICE and other agencies with impunity. The abuse of Americans’ personal data won’t stop until Congress or states pass clear laws that give users an easy way to block the sale of their data, or to ban the sale of personal data altogether.”

– Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)

The data is commercially available, so government institutions make the argument that they can buy it without a warrant and it doesn’t violate your 4th amendment rights. What’s worse, some of these services get data from even sketchier sources that might violate your rights, but the use of them hasn’t been appropriately challenged yet. These pull data from the dark web: troves of leaked and hacked data that contains the contents of emails, passwords and email addresses, and more. These also use AI to link all the data together, providing not only a digital fingerprint of someone, completely unique to them, but an entire profile of everything about them. The data may have been stolen and posted illegally, but the government isn’t directing that hacking or specifying that they want data from stolen sources. They keep themselves separate from the dirty work, but may end up benefiting from it.

PenLink: Tangles and WebLoc

One company putting together profiles on people using online tools, PenLink, provides their services to law enforcement across the country. ICE is paying them millions for access to two of their services: Tangles and WebLoc.

ICE is paying for these apps because they create an easy to use interface for troves of data. WebLoc, for example, can track phones without a warrant, telling ICE where the phone goes, where it’s been, and details about the device and its owner. Users can draw a shape on the map to get information on the devices inside of it. It’s useful for ID’ing people and figuring out where they work and live. It’s also useful for seeing if a person has been to a protest or other area of interest. Tools like this can help identify January 6th insurrectionists, for example. Law enforcement users can choose to target a business they suspect employs undocumented immigrants and then see if there’s a high concentration of people who hang outside of that particular business regularly living in a building of interest. If there is, that could be reason to raid the building itself.

“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with.”

– Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media.

Tangles is another app. This uses AI to pull data on individuals from across the web, creating a unified profile from the scattered data online. While AI can hallucinate, it’s safe to say that, for many people, these profiles are likely accurate enough to give ICE reason to look into someone. After all, ICE paid $2 million for access to Tangles alone. It has to be worth something, right?

“This extension and expansion of ICE’s PenLink contract underlines the federal government’s enthusiasm for indiscriminate and warrantless data collection on as many people as possible.”

– Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the EFF, speaking to Forbes

Tangles pulls data from a wide variety of sources. This includes communication tools, location data, financial records, social networks, contacts, and even data from the dark web. Think of it like an AI-powered tool that crawls around the web, finding any pieces of data that can be linked to a person, and then groups it together. From that data, they can build a “day in the life” view of everything an individual might be up to. It’s a powerful tool, the kind of thing you’d see in a dystopian Cyberpunk story (and if you played Cyberpunk 2077, you saw a few examples of this exact plot), but it’s very real and in use by ICE.

They can use this tool to monitor entire neighborhoods. Who lives in what areas, what areas have more immigrants, or protesters. Where do the democrats live and where you can find the “disruptors.” When a masked agency for a fascist government starts making lists, especially ones based on political beliefs, race, or other invariable characteristics, it’s never a good thing.

ELITE

ICE is using a tool called “Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement,” or ELITE. Palantir has a tool called “Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement,” or ELITE. Yes, it’s the same title, but the internal ICE documents 404 Media obtained did not name Palantir as the maker of ELITE directly. Palantir works on for the U.S. government already, including ICE, so it’s possible, if not likely, that they’re the same product.

ELITE tells ICE the likelihood of a person’s location and whether or not they are a likely deportation target. It has a dossier on just about everyone in the U.S., so that ICE can ID and check on the status on anyone. It even has a feature that allows ICE to draw a shape on the map and see the profiles of the people in that area, including identifying if it’s a “target rich” area for immigrants they may want to detain. ELITE’s just one of the many dangerous tools ICE is using now to surveil neighborhoods and make decisions on whether or not to cause trouble in them. Increasingly, those decisions are coming down to data.

Collecting Your DNA

The FBI set up a criminal database for law enforcement agencies across the U.S. in the 90’s. It is called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. There are millions of entries into the database, full of criminals who had their DNA taken as part of processing as part of a case or after their conviction. It’s helped connect people to crimes and catch people who would have otherwise gotten away with literal murder had it not been for that pesky stuff that both makes our lives possible and makes us mostly unique. Sorry, twins. But, hey, at least your fingerprints are still different!

There are multiple parts of the database, from victims of crimes to the samples collected of perpetrators and convicted criminals. Being on the list could reportedly increase the likelihood of facing increased scrutiny from any law enforcement agencies who you may interact with. You don’t want to be in any database if you don’t have to.

“Taking DNA from a 4-year old and adding it into CODIS flies in the face of any immigration purpose … That’s not immigration enforcement. That’s genetic surveillance.”

– Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, to Wired

However, if you came across Customs and Border Protection, CBP, you may have ended up in the database. The organization has not been authorized by congress to do widespread DNA sampling, but Donald Trump in 2025 may have indirectly endorsed the process. He said they should use “any available technologies” to try to find groups of family members of immigrants. It’s terrifying to think of Trump trying to use connections between families, especially after news that ICE may have tried to use a child as bait. CBP has likely entered over a million people into CODIS, with around 2,000 entries having no field filled out for the criminal offense the data was being entered for. There are children being added to this database for no crime besides being suspected as immigrants by CBP, which, as we know, may decide skin color, language spoken, or cultural norms and connections are reason enough to stop, detain, scan, and otherwise harass a person.

Staying Safe

Against tyranny, you have to protect yourself. You may think you’re safe, you’re doing nothing wrong, but that is not how the fascist machine operates. Should a person be detained for walking while dark skinned? Should a woman be shot in the face and called a “fucking bitch” for turning her car around? Should a man be shot multiple times in the back for helping a woman stand up? Should a family get teargassed heading home from a school sporting event? Should you have to fear speaking up against that? No. You shouldn’t face violence for going to school or work or to the shop. There should be no danger in free speech. But you may face violence for it. There isn’t much you can do to protect yourself from that. But you can take steps to make sure that if you do decide to exercise your first amendment right your family won’t have to talk about how sweet you were over your grave.

We live in a world with terrifying technology that helps track us, reinforce racial bias, and force us into complacency and silence. Technology is never airtight, and there are still things you can do to at least improve your privacy and safety in public. However, if you’re using the internet, ever uploaded a photo of yourself, or even just have a government-issued photo ID, like a drivers license or passport, then your facial data is in the hands of ICE, and they could be tracking far more than your whereabouts, but could be building data on whether or not you’re a dissenter, an enemy of the regime.

With the dangers looming for all Americans, and especially for non-white Americans, you’ll likely want some tips to help you. I wish I had more. I wish I could give you the tip that makes you safe. But the tools used against us are too powerful, and the people who are supposed to protect us in our government are content with sternly worded letters instead of real action. Now we have to live in fear, but you can put up a few walls to make yourself a little safer.

Making Identification and Tracking More Difficult

I wanted to split this up into two sections: some general tips to improve your privacy every day, and those more for if you’re at high risk, or if you’re protesting. But the truth is, they overlap so much. Someone who isn’t high risk today could be at high risk tomorrow just because they witnessed something on their way home, so take what you can of these tips and make yourself a little more safe.

Also, frankly, there are a ton of tips. So, rather than give a bunch of details on each one, I’ll just list them. However, I will likely expand on a few of the most important items in the coming weeks or months.

Protecting Your Tech

  • Get a browser focused on privacy.
  • Use Signal. Get the hell off WhatsApp. In fact, stop chatting on SMS or even iMessage if you can help it. iMessage is only encrypted between iOS devices, and if the other person hasn’t locked down their iCloud account with advanced encryption, it’s not safe enough.
    • Also, don’t connect Signal to your contacts, don’t use your full name. Don’t add a profile picture. Only use secondary devices that do not have biometrics enabled.
  • Enable enhanced protection on your iCloud account. This encrypts everything so only you can unlock it with your password.
  • Sorry, don’t have a good tip for Android users besides don’t use Android. Perhaps you can de-Google your phone as much as possible? This is quite difficult for the average consumer though. You could buy a phone that comes without Google services. For many reasons, I’m a fan of the Fairphone.
  • Use a VPN. I recommend Proton VPN. Don’t use a free VPN. You’re trying to avoid giving your information out, free VPNs will likely make their money either through ads or by selling your data.
  • Avoid ads at all costs. Install ad blockers, use the browser version of apps with an ad blocker installed instead of the app itself. Tell your VPN to filter out ads. Ads are what enable so much of the tracking you see online.
  • Ditch Google… anything. Kagi is great for search, as is Duck Duck Go. Proton has mail and calendar replacements. Apple Maps aren’t as bad as you may have heard, it just released too early.
  • Keep your face off social media. It’s too easy to create deepfakes anyway. If you do, just put something over your eyes and cheekbones, at least, to make identification more difficult.
  • Never turn on location settings. If an app needs it, allow it only while using it.
  • Read the privacy policies of the apps that have your private data. Maybe then people would have realized TikTok had a plethora of their private information a long time ago.
  • Remove metadata from photos and videos you upload
  • Don’t upload your ID anywhere, use a VPN to get around such requirements
  • Just don’t give our data. Think about how you use every piece of tech you own, and try to ask yourself what data you might be giving away.
  • Follow blogs that discuss issues of privacy. But don’t waste your time with social media, that is a method of tracking you too. Just use RSS. Here’s how.

Safely Protesting

None of these tips can truly make protest safe in a fascist regime. You will not be safe, even if you follow every one of these tips. But I hope they help, but I promise you no actual security. You will be endangering your life if you choose the protest, it’s the sad reality of our anti-speech government.

  • Cover yourself up as much as possible.
  • Bring distilled water. Not purified, not bottled, distilled. It doesn’t have additives and is safer to use to flush out your eyes.
  • Wear masks to protests. preferably a respirator given police’s tear gas tactics, but a KN95 may also provide some protection
  • Consider sunglasses that also block IR, like those from Zenni. Facial recognition systems often use IR to see through thin fabrics and sunglasses, but IR glasses can block this.
  • You’ll also likely want shatter resistant goggles. These are often made for lab settings. A full face respirator can help, as long as it also features shatter resistance. Cops love to aim rubber bullets at your eyes out of cruelty, and any bit of protection helps
  • Bring hearing protection. Foam earplugs won’t cut it, get shop hearing protection or those used by hunters when practicing shooting. Hearing damage is permanent.
  • Wear plain clothing without logos
  • Buy a faraday bag for your phone. Consider using it while you’re at protests or even just while you’re traveling
  • Again, turn off all biometrics on your phone.
  • On your iPhone, turn on “lockdown mode.” This will make some aspects of your iPhone not work as expected, but it also makes your phone much harder to break into. The FBI recently failed, again, to break into an iPhone because lockdown mode was enabled.
  • Consider a burner phone or even a mesh network device or walkie-talkies for communicating with anyone you’re grouped with

Finally, find your local ICE Watch organizations. They’ll have instructions on what to do if you see ICE and how to report them. You can find many organizations on Instagram, and they often accept reports in a number of ways, including by phone call or text.

Stay Safe, Stay Alive, Make Something Better

We can’t forget this moment. this fear, this anger. If we forget it, we’ll allow some simple placation stand as compensation for what we’ve gone through, as a nation. We need to abolish ICE. We need to rethink our cruel immigration systems, policing, and the powers we grant the president. We cannot allow “establishment” politicians return us to the “status quo,” we have to make sure our representatives make laws that will protect us, so we never have to go through anything like this ever again. ICE wasn’t built by Trump. It has existed for over two decades now, through Democrats and Republicans alike. ICE and other police forces in America, from local to federal, have had access to data that should be constitutionally protected and private for years now. Commercial data, laundering of stolen data from the dark web, all sold to our own government. We can’t let the cruelty of ICE or the power we’ve granted police forces be forgotten once this time of turmoil is behind us. No matter who wins our next elections, we can’t let them get away from ignoring this moment. We have to learn from it and make it impossible for anyone to be so afraid of our government ever again.

If I could do something for you, it would make the world not be this way. Our forebears failed us, giving us a world that is falling apart, one that trades compassion for greed. When greed fails, it always turns to violence. Maybe, if we speak up, the next generations won’t be able to say the same about us. It is a compassionate person who plants a tree whose shade they will never know. We need to plant more trees. Until then, I hope you can at least see the forest through the fire. I hope we all make it there together. Stay safe, friend.

Sources:
, ,