Due to its classification as a branch of civil law, immigration law already enjoys a number of exemptions from traditional checks on law enforcement. The so-called “exclusionary principle” states that evidence obtained in a manner that violates the Fourth Amendment must be excluded from prosecution. For instance, if a search pursuant to a criminal investigation was conducted without a search warrant, that evidence would be inadmissible in court. But in immigration law, INS v. Lopez-Mendoza ruled that the exclusionary principles does not apply to immigration law. Restrictions on ICE arrests are also lax compared to agencies enforcing criminal statutes. Another case, Abel v. United States, established that ICE agents need only the agency’s I-205 form to make an arrest in a public place, and not an arrest warrant signed by a judge.

The latest ICE memo featured in the reporting attempts to expand this very same I-205 form to cover arrests on private property. As the article indicates that the contents of this memo are being administered as verbal instructions, rather than delivered in written form to all personnel, this (if accurate) suggests that the agency suspects that this is a controversial arrogation of law enforcement powers. Indeed, the Code of Federal Regulations states that immigration enforcement agents must still secure a judicial warrant to set foot on private property to arrest suspects.

ICE’s moves to supercharge the I-205 administrative warrant are not the first time that immigration enforcement has taken the lead in eroding the Fourth Amendment. Airports and other ports of entry have been exempted from the Fourth Amendment, which is what empowers such bodies as the TSA to make searches and interrogate travelers at its sole discretion. And as CCDBR has noted previously, there is a 100-mile band extending into the interior from the border in which the federal government asserts that there is no right to Fourth Amendment protections.

This new assertion of authority will likely prove a decisive battleground for preserving the integrity of the Fourth Amendment. While it is less sensational than scenes of masked agents roving the streets, it is every bit as dangerous to American liberty.

You can read the full piece from AP News here.

The post New Leaked ICE Memo Asserts Power to Enter Homes Without A Warrant first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

Specifically, ICE enjoys this capacity based on two Penlink products: “Webloc” and “Tangles”. Webloc boasts the most invasive features of the two, as it empowers the agency to track cellular devices by geographical area and time. With an interface similar to a navigation app, analysts need only draw a perimeter on a region of a map and specify a time window, and the program queries the Penlink database for all cellular devices that traversed that area in that period of time. Users can then follow up on any of the devices identified to see a historical log of all the places that device has been, even outside the initial search region.

The software is particularly apt for depicting the patterns of life of targeted devices. Once a device has been selected, the results page outputs summary statistics such as its operating system, the average amount of time the device was present at a location, and the number of location data points Penlink has for the device. Taken together with a tally of the device’s pinpointed locations and timestamps, it is easy to derive the device owner’s pattern of life: where they live, where they work, and who they socialize with.

The document does not specify how Penlink obtains cellular location data, but the article’s author, the veteran privacy reporter Joseph Cox, speculates that the company purchases it from data brokers. Penlink’s own statement on its business practices does not contradict this conjecture, as the company maintains that all the data supplied to users is either available on the public Internet, or purchased from data brokers. This is not hard to imagine, as these vendors are not known for being choosy about their clientele.

The 404 Media piece does an excellent job of examining the legal distinctions by which ICE justifies its use of tools like Webloc. Another ICE internal document obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request elucidates the federal government’s own differentiation between telecom location metadata and commercial location data. While the document does defer to Carpenter v. United States, which established that the exceptionally sensitive nature of cellular location metadata entitles it to Fourth Amendment protections, commercial location data—the kind of location data obtained and transmitted by mobile applications—is deemed less sensitive. The latter, the document argues, stems from the mobile device user’s voluntary installation of the application, and choice to enable location permissions for it, and is thus a “business record” of the sort that the government is allowed to obtain under Smith v. Maryland’s “third-party doctrine”.

The other of ICE’s new Penlink toys, Tangles, is primarily a social media monitoring tool. As social media is, by its nature, public, its intrusiveness is notably less than that of Webloc. However, its facial recognition capability, when used in conjunction with other data collection initiatives, can facilitate extraordinarily invasive mass surveillance. ICE agents could take videos or still images of protests—or really any scene on an American street—and feed it to Tangles, and the program could identify all the faces captured. It would be trivial for this to be done in real time, as ICE officers and their vehicles are equipped with cameras that are capable of relaying live images to an analyst, who could then put them in Tangles’s crosshairs.

The nature of the products ICE has purchased from Penlink in just a year demonstrate how quickly a government agency can achieve mass surveillance power practically overnight. Savvy civil liberties defenders would be wise to routinely query every law enforcement agency, and keep close scrutiny on its ratified contracts, to track the expansion of spying powers over time. Failing to keep pace with the government would make regulating its behavior nearly impossible.

You can read the full article from 404 Media here.

The post Surveillance Tooling Newly Acquired By ICE Can Track Entire Neighborhoods Without A Warrant first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

Under Illinois state law, the “Drones as First Responders Act” requires law enforcement to annually disclose to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) the time, location, and purpose of every instance in which a drone was deployed. This is a vital transparency measure governing this nascent surveillance technology, but even its proponents believe it does not go far enough. ICJIA spokesperson Cristin Evans noted that the disclosure requirement does not define any penalties for law enforcement agencies which fail to submit records of drone usage in a timely manner. On top of that, the Drones as First Responders Act is also ambiguous on how descriptive drone deployment justifications must be, leading police departments to supply frustratingly terse records.

Even when law enforcement meets the letter of reporting obligations to the ICJIA, this can reveal concerning patterns that raise questions on the adequacy of police accountability. Case in point, when CPD was found not to have disclosed drone usage in 2023, the department stated that this was because they did not make use of any drones that year. However, as the report highlights, registration data with the FAA indicates that CPD has owned drones since 2020. Unless this equipment was collecting dust in storage in the intervening period, the department’s claim is suspect.

The CCSO’s late disclosure on 2024 drone utilization was not its only, or even most concerning, lapse in transparency. The article also recounts the agency conducting a 2-week test of drones owned by the law enforcement hardware vendor Axon “without any agreement governing the ownership or use of sensitive data collected by the devices”. Recall that Axon, formerly and more widely known as TASER International, is a major supplier of police-worn body cameras across the country, which carry data privacy concerns of their own.

What makes public-private law enforcement partnerships so pernicious is that, any time data obtained by law enforcement falls into the hands of private companies, it becomes far more difficult to audit or account for what becomes of it. Government and the private sector have formed a symbiosis in which each uses the other to get around otherwise pesky strips of red tape. For example, it is now a common practice for law enforcement to purchase from data brokers to evade Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure. Conversely, corporations can mooch off of governments for the latter’s legal sanction to gather sensitive data on citizens.

This specific instance is particularly illustrative of the legal shell game that can ensue when law enforcement contracts private vendors. While the drones provided to CCSO were owned by Axon, they were manufactured by a company called Skydio, in which Axon is an investor. So when reporters pressed Axon on whether it collected data as part of the test, Axon pointed fingers back at the CCSO and Skydio.

The Cook County Sheriff’s office does deserve a modicum of credit for acknowledging its missed disclosure deadline and failure to stipulate data privacy provisions for its test run with Axon. In response to The Chicago Reader’s inquiries, representatives of the CCSO stated that the office is weighing whether tests of private sector products should be governed by special data sharing agreements. Pressure from the media and civil liberties organizations doubtless played a role in nudging county law enforcement in this direction.

Thus, the piece provides a valuable roadmap for civil liberties defenders. With legislation like the Drones as First Responders Act providing a foothold where no meaningful limitations would otherwise exist, supplementing it with enforcement capabilities can afford firming footing for incentivizing departments to comply.

You can read the full report from The Chicago Reader here.

The post Chicago-Area Law Enforcement Repeatedly Violated State Drone Disclosure Regulations first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

In the piece, Joseph Cox, a veteran digital privacy reporter profiles the “Mobile Fortify” immigration enforcement application, its capabilities, and the policies that govern its use. The application was initially developed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to scan the faces and fingerprints of detained individuals to determine their US immigrations status. Since then, CBP has extended it to ICE for its own use.

Practically all of what Cox revealed about Mobile Fortify comes from an internal DHS privacy assessment document, known as a Privacy Threshold Analysis (PTA). Ratified within DHS in May, and obtained by Cox via FOIA request, the document plainly states that subjects of a face scan have no legal right to refuse. This pertains even to US citizens, and the document issues no particular guidance how agents should proceed in such cases.

Photos submitted to the application are queried against numerous DHS databases. Of these, the most notable is CBP‘s Traveler Verification Service, which is responsible for facilitating the facial recognition of all passengers flying into or out of the US. Photos submitted for analysis are retained for no less than 15 years, irrespective of whether or not the subject was subsequently detained or charged, and regardless of the subject’s citizenship status.

As such, Mobile Fortify affords ICE the formidable capacity to identify anyone, assuming their photo is present in a federal government database the app can tap into. It is hard to know how many photos these databases contain in aggregate, but as CCDBR has often noted, the FBI alone has hundreds of millions of face photos, many of which are submitted from state driver’s license records. Thus, in practice, this means that federal agents may well have the means to identify anyone at any time.

Closer review of the document unearths more details on the Mobile Fortify’s deployment, as well as on what elements DHS considers as part of their formal privacy reviews. The form’s respondent does specifically maintain that app data is not transmitted to any entities outside DHS. Given how notoriously national security peruse one another’s data, this claim merits much skepticism. What is most telling, though, is the criteria for screening a subject for facial recognition analysis. The document notes only an agent’s “encounter” with a subject as sufficient grounds for the agent to gather the subject’s biometric information via the app. No legal definition of “encounter” is supplied in the PTA document. In the context of state and local law enforcement, officers traditionally detained an individual before collecting biometric identifiers such as fingerprints. Whatever the legal scope of “encounter” may be, it is clearly distinct from that of “detention”.

ICE’s insistence that it may coerce anyone who crosses an agent’s path to submit to facial recognition begs the question: on what legal basis does DHS assert this authority? This is not explicated anywhere in the document. However, legal precedent does exist that DHS could readily point to upon challenge. First, according to the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration agents are empowered to stop anyone they suspect may be a deportable alien. It is not obvious whether this extends to ICE “encounters”. Second, case law has established that those in public have no “reasonable expectation of privacy”. Just as those captured in photos taken in a public place have no legal recourse, law enforcement has availed itself of this pretext for deploying sprawling camera networks. It is simply an unhappy accident that photos of one’s face constitute vital biometric data.

If these two arguments are insufficiently persuasive, a fallback position is that most of the US population is located within a “border zone” in which there is no expectation of privacy. This has traditionally been applied to international airports, ports of entry, and the US land border with Mexico and Canada. But this legal distinction may be leveraged as the expediency of government policy demands.

With the application’s genesis in CBP, Mobile Fortify is yet another instance where immigration enforcement at the US Southern border is used as a test bed for the rest of the country. This area is also where domestic drone surveillance was first piloted, a practice which may soon be commonplace in American cities. It is also just one more of a myriad ways in which the ideal of personal privacy which animates the Fourth Amendment is being eroded. That it may not directly contravene the Fourth Amendment does not mean that civil liberties ought to concede security against omnipresent facial recognition. The emergence of the DHS’s internal records into the public sphere allows defenders of American liberty to tailor their court battles.

It also serves as a cue to constituents to exert their influence on their elected representatives. Congress has the means to legislate restrictions on this otherwise uninhibited employment of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement. With the right framing, perhaps every political faction can be prompted to imagine the ills that would stem from their foes wielding such a potent and invasive tool as coercive facial recognition, and thus be motivated to prevent its proliferation at this still-early juncture.

You can read the full piece from 404 Media here.

The post ICE Arrogates the Right to Scan the Face of Any US Resident, at Any Time, for Any Reason first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

As a Washington Post article cited in the writeup points out, ICE expenditures on surveillance equipment this year is nearing record levels. Last month, the agency ratified $1.4 billion in contracts, an 18-year high for an agency only 23 years old. Here are the more notable among them.

• A $4.6 million contract for an iris recognition system from BI2 Technologies. As CCDBR has noted in the past, one element that makes spying by the federal government so formidable is its capacity to cross-link the databases of its various agencies. The FBI alone has hundreds of millions of driver’s license photos, and has a history of pursuing intelligence sharing arrangements with other agencies, notably the NSA. But if there was any question as to the extent of interagency collaboration, Trump’s order to mandate the pooling of Americans’ data—and the millions of dollars his administration has already spent to engage Palantir to operationalize it—have eliminated any lingering doubt. So, from technical and policy considerations, it is quite possible that this latest purchase could enable the identification a wide swath of the American population.
• A $3.75 million contract with Clearview AI, a now-infamous name in surveillance tech. The company’s calling card is facial recognition technology that made even Facebook blush.
• A $2 million contract to purchase social media tracking tools from Penlink. Among these purchases, the “Weblocs” application is not only able to build dossiers on targets using publicly available social media data, but also to track phone location data obtained from private sector data miners.

But ICE is doing more to beef up its spying powers than going on a shopping spree. The DHS law enforcement arm is minting partnerships with private sector players to secure the right to tap into data that can be leveraged to track anyone on US soil. For instance, ICE recently shook hands with Flock Safety, which operates 80,000 license plate readers nationwide.

All the indiscriminate monitoring technologies that ICE now possesses share the dangers noted in CCDBR’s analysis of stingray devices, which is that they sweep up everyone incidental to the target of law enforcement. It cannot be denied that there are documented cases of small rioting elements coincident to law-abiding demonstrations. However, should the various tools ICE has acquired be applied in the service of riot suppression—or merely under the pretext of such—they will scoop up law-abiding protesters and bystanders as well.

Indeed, the Trump administration has assured Americans that the targets of ICE’s surveillance architecture are undocumented immigrants and “domestic terrorists”. But this edifice is a mere turnkey away from targeting anyone and everyone who dares speak out against the administration, or express any other disfavored speech. One portent of such a trend is the Trump DOJ successfully strong-arming Apple into removing a crowdsourcing application for avoiding ICE presence. The application allows users to indicate areas where they’ve observed ICE agents. While the DOJ characterizes it as a threat to agents’ safety, the app’s developer likened it to flagging speed traps, which even Google Maps allows its users to do.

Taken together, the Homeland Security apparatus now possesses even more means to activate a Panopticon with immigration enforcement and keeping the peace as a pretext. In the absence of regulatory laws passed to constrain the use of mass surveillance tools, there is little stopping precisely this.

You can read the full piece from Reason here.

The post ICE Digital Arms Buildup Equipping Agency for Mass Surveillance Operations first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

But Carr’s offhand remarks quickly dispelled any uncertainty by underscoring that Trump’s Executive Branch was prepared to wield its considerable powers to stifle disfavored speech. His insinuations follow musings by Trump suggesting the FCC revoke licenses from broadcasters whose programs consistently give him bad press. Taken together, Trump’s new tack on speech constitutes his most aggressive line yet, and an unprecedented threat to free speech in the United States.

This is so much so the case that even Trump’s traditional allies are taking notice. No less than Republican Senator Ted Cruz characterized Carr’s statement as the tenor of a “mafioso” running an extortion racket.

Of course, the supreme irony at play is that these acts of censorship are being carried out in defense of Kirk, whom conservatives were quick to hold up as a free speech martyr. While only the vigilant efforts of law enforcement can forestall criminal acts by private citizens to chill speech, the government is bound by the constitution, a covenant with all its free citizens, to respect the right of free speech. These incursions by the Trump administration must be halted here lest an alarming precedent be set for all future presidential office-holders.

You can read the full piece from NPR here.

The post Trump Administration Threatens to Wield FCC Against Speech Foes first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

A DOJ press release enumerates a number of offenses allegedly committed by various individuals in conjunction with the meetup. Its characterization of Mavalwalla’s role essentially amounts to blocking a DHS facility driveway that ICE agents sought to access—civil disobedience in its classic form.

Interestingly, though, he is not being charged with obstruction of justice or failure to obey a lawful order to disperse, but “conspiracy”.As legal experts cited in the reporting point out, it is not clear merely from the inciting social media post that the action was premeditated and coordinated, as would need to be proven to a jury to secure a conspiracy conviction. Rather, it would seem to be more akin to crowdsourcing: simply putting out the call to rally at a designated place and time, and carrying out actions ad hoc with the support of whoever shows up.

First Amendment legal scholars have zeroed in on Mavalwalla’s prosecution as a critical test case. In their estimation, it could be wielded by Trump’s DOJ as a means of inching closer to de facto prosecuting First Amendment speech, by casting protesters as conspirators. An erosion here would open the door to a crackdown akin to COINTELPRO in the activism-rich 1970s.

You can read the full report from The Guardian here.

The post Trump Administration Closes in on Free Speech with Conspiracy Charges Against Protester first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

As FIRE—and, previously, CCDBR—pointed out, burning of the American flag (or any other flag) is well-established in US case law as a form of First Amendment-protected speech. No president has the power to unilaterally rebuke the court rulings, most notably Texas v. Johnson, which guarantee this form of expression to Americans.

The order clumsily attempts to sidestep the courts by specifying that it solely advises the prosecution of those who burn flags in connection with other offenses. But if other offenses have been committed, then prosecution can already be pursued, Trump’s executive order notwithstanding. Thus, the directive materially changes neither the law nor the constitution. At most, it underscores the thrust of his administration’s “prosecutorial discretion.”

Civil liberties advocates should take this as a prompt to be vigilant for future, more serious incursions into speech freedom from the Trump White House.

You can read the full press release from FIRE here. 

The post Trump Attempts to Erode Free Speech with Executive Order Prosecuting Flag-Burning first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

Though aligned with the interests of the Atlanta Police Department, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) is a separate nonprofit entity. However, this nonprofit was believed to be the custodian of records pertinent to law enforcement policy in the city of Atlanta. Because nonprofit entities have historically been exempt from compliance with open records laws, the Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC), filed the now-closed lawsuit, contending that the APF was being used to effectively withhold documents of interest to the public from efforts at transparency.

The judge in the case ruled that the APF was obligated to serve requests under the State of Georgia’s Open Records Act. This victory for government oversight sets the key precedent that government-linked foundations are fair game for government transparency advocates.

However, the article is careful to point out that the judge’s opinion did not rule on the nature of documents held by government- or police-linked foundations as a class. Rather, the ruling only established that the documents requested by the plaintiffs met the criteria to be considered eligible for request under the Open Records Act. Even so, it charts a path for civic actors to obtain records from extra-governmental organizations where before they were regarded as impenetrable. The APCP has already pressed its advantage and issued requests for additional records from the APF.

Of interest to Chicago civil libertarians, it bears noting that Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL) was a co-plaintiff with ACPC. LPL has administered workshops organized by CCDBR specifically on filing freedom of information requests, and many of their members are nationally recognized experts on the subject, particularly the Freedom of Information Act. In addition to being a local Chicago civil liberties organization, LPL is also a fellow member of the Electronic Frontier Alliance.

We applaud our esteemed peers at LPL for this landmark in open records law interpretation and adjudication.

You can read the full article from The Guardian here.

The post CCDBR Ally Lucy Parsons Labs Wins Major Battle for Police Transparency first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

While, DOGE is certainly the most conspicuous element of Trump’s data centralization push, it is far from the most serious. Using DOGE for cover is a Trump executive order from March instructing agencies in his administration to relax data sharing restrictions. The order stipulated a 30-day timeline for compliance, so any resultant policy changes have most likely already taken effect.

But the most concerning aspect of the executive order is the mandate for tighter coupling of state data systems to federal ones. Although it doesn’t outright coerce states into sharing data with the federal government, it threatens to withhold federal funding from states which refuse. This tactic is much in vogue today among leaders of both parties for making state and local governments subscribe to top-down political projects.

The primary danger that attends concentrating data into fewer hands is that it exponentially increases how much is revealed about the subjects of that data. Two data points on an individual are greater than their modest sum because they also allow correlation—A plus B makes A, B, and the association of A and B. In cutting across a wide swath of federal agencies, DOGE analysts are able to assemble a far more detailed picture of citizens than any of the source agencies could individually.

These Trump White House moves once again highlight that agencies’ self-imposed data governance policies are inherently insufficient. The text of the executive order states that agency heads are to follow the order “to the maximum extent consistent with law”. Assuming this is honored in practice, it still means that the statutes on the books prior to the order were the only real backstops on interagency data aggregation. Seasoned civil libertarians know that Americans cannot rely on the government to voluntarily tie its own hands: only legislation and transparency can impose any real limits on government data collection and usage.

As critics point out, in addition to the adverse impacts on privacy which may result from these newly revised data policies, it also puts citizens’ data at greater risk of theft. As the ACLU aptly puts it, each government entity should have only the data it needs to do its respective job. The IT field more broadly terms this the “principle of least privilege”, a bedrock security practice that only the most flagrantly irresponsible stewards of data would defy. DOGE is taking an extremely liberal interpretation of the least privilege it requires to effect its professed mission of rooting out fraud. The fledgling “department” could have just as easily accomplished its mission by installing a singular DOGE officer in each agency chosen for audit, so that each auditor can view only that agency’s data.

The prospect of data security lapses is not strictly a civil liberties concern, but the appeal to the security pitfalls of concentrating troves of sensitive data does align civil liberties campaigners with national security interests, the latter historically having more influence on government policy. As the piece in The Hill accuratelypoints out, amassing into one data store what was formerly split into multiple incentivizes hackers to concentrate on that target, and makes successful attacks that much more damaging. And remember, “hackers” are not limited to isolated Internet ne’er-do-wells, but extends to hostile nation-state cyberwarfare units.

The one critical point The Hill misses is how consistent Trump’s directive, unsettling as it is, with presidents before him, going back at least as far as George W. Bush. CCDBR has on many occasions remarked on fusion centers, FBI facial recognition databases assembled from state government data, and the NSA pilfering from the rest of the government.

The FBI is one of the most gluttonous data hogs in the government. In addition to the aforementioned state driver’s license photos it slurps up, the FBI taps into data stores such as the State Department Passport Photo File, Department of Defense’s Automated Biometric Identification System. The bureau’s FACE Services Unit grants it yet more interagency access.

But of course, none are more notorious data sleuths than the NSA. It is able to tap into the FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit. The Snowden files also show the extent to which the NSA infiltrated bodies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to enable even wider access. At least the agency is cordial enough to reciprocate, though, as it allows the FBI and DEA to tap into NSA troves under its ICEREACH program.

Still, Trump’s refusal to rein in government data hoarding only entrenches a trend accelerated during the War on Terror. With each administration continuing in this direction, the route for walking such practices back becomes ever longer. A concerted push by constituents to urge their representatives to restrain government data collection remains as vital as ever.

You can read the full article from The Hill here.

The post With the Help of a Good DOGE, Trump Admin Unleashes Federal Data Aggregation Practices first appeared on Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.