Photo: DAVID MCNEW / AFP / Getty Images
For: EFE Updated 10 May 2022, 32: 50 pm EDT
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) has scanned with facial recognition technology at least one third of all adult driver’s licenses in the US, according to a report released Tuesday by Georgetown University on the secret surveillance and without permission from this agency.
Analysis of data obtained through hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests found that ICE has used such technology in the driver’s license photographs of approximately 32 % of all adults in the country.
ICE also has access to driver’s license data from the 74 % and tracks the movements of cars in the cities where the 70 % of that adult population.
The report from the Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law School indicates that ICE can locate 3 of every 4 adults (74 %) through their utility records.
It highlights that the agency could automatically know the new address of these adults when they connected the gas, electricity, telephone or internet in a new home.
“Almost all of that it has been done without a warrant and in secret”, highlights the report entitled “American Dragnet: Data-driven Deportation in the 21st Century”.
Nina Wang, one of its authors, said that “ICE has spent billions of dollars building an infrastructure to monitor almost everyone in the United States”.
In this sense, Dan Bateyko, coordinator of the inv investigation, warned that “for three presidencies, ICE spending has not been controlled.”
In 2008 the agency had a spending budget of $71 million dollars, and has now risen to $388 millions of dollars. “An increase of five times”, he highlights.
The researchers also found that the vast majority of states have not adopted meaningful privacy protections that restrict disclosure to law enforcement of utility customer information.
“What this report shows is the way in which the federal government has used the corrupt legal and political framework around immigration law enforcement as a means to expand radical surveillance powers over immigrant communities in particular”, underlined Emily Tucker
, director of the Center, who lamented that this surveillance reaches “everyone indiscriminately”.
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