Vermont is one of 12 states that, along with the District of Columbia, allow undocumented people to get driver's licenses. Since 2008, ICE has spent 2.8 billion on surveillance, according to researchers who reviewed 100,000 spending transactions and hundreds of freedom of information requests. Rosenthal's organization joined with the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont and a collection of other advocates to represent Migrant Justice's case against ICE and the Vermont DMV in federal court. ICE has used facial recognition technology to search through driver’s license photos for nearly one-third of the country. "We've seen a pattern of DMV employees referring people to ICE unnecessarily," Josh Rosenthal, a staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, told me in November. These exchanges were sometimes accompanied by racist emails or text messages-for instance, DMV employees sent ICE information on driver's license applicants who they said had "south of the border names."
#ICE DRIVER LICENSE FACIAL RECOGNITION DRIVERS#
Public records unveiled during the lawsuit revealed that DMV employees regularly sent information on drivers to ICE agents, potentially in violation of privacy laws. Thus far, the agency has been mum on the report, but government still answers to the people, and the people need answers about who might be looking over their shoulder and why.Migrant Justice's lawsuit alleges that ICE is specifically targeting undocumented activists, with active collaboration by DMV employees. Those are great ideas and whatever might emerge from those actions must be shared with the public. Neither Congress nor state legislatures have approved distributing driver information using this technology. The report calls for Congress to step in by passing laws to limit the agency’s use of driver’s license data and also convene a hearing or launch a probe into the matter. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been using state driver’s license databases for facial-recognition searches without the driver’s knowledge or consent. ICE’s practices have raised concerns among privacy advocates for years – well before the scope of the agency’s data-collection came into public view. Certainly, as part of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE has important work to do, but the agency appears to have exercised far too much zeal in using available technology to assist its mission.
It’s something else, though, when government agencies go beyond their legitimate mandate and pierce individual privacy through dubious means intended to get around existing legal guardrails. Many times, average consumers don’t know they are giving away some aspect of their privacy because they didn’t “opt out” or because they failed to read every word of a lengthy and often inscrutable “terms of agreement” document that popped up during a mobile-device shopping endeavor.
These days, individual-level data is critical for social media companies, retailers, marketers, political campaigns and other efforts. It is no secret that privacy protections have steadily vanished over the past two decades due to a confluence of factors. ICE’s domestic surveillance focus budget has swelled from $71 million to roughly $388 million between 20. It is building up capacity that it hadn’t had before.”Īccording to the report, ICE has private data brokers to assemble this information on Americans and immigrants, which has allowed it to operate with little oversight and get around state-level legislation focused on privacy protection. “That’s what we’re talking about when we’re saying it’s growing into a domestic surveillance agency. “This information is personal data,” Dan Bateyko, co-author of the report, “American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century,” said in our story.
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