ICE is Paying Millions to Spy on People’s Communications

Surveillance images from East German Stasi archives (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

This is yet another reminder that we live in a nation in which citizen surveillance is assumed, with our permission, to be a infinitely expandable right possessed by government.

Even ICE, the immigration control service, spies on Americans, and has done so since at least 2014 under President Obama.

This surveillance takes two forms. First, ICE contracts with a major private company to engage directly in wiretapping and other targeted surveillance. Second, ICE buys and collects data from private big data aggregators — like Thomson Reuters — to add to what it knows about its enemies. Yes, that Thomson Reuters, the news people. Seems they're part of the big-data spook-state industry as well.

From Privacy International (emphasis mine):

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency at the centre of carrying out President Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach to immigration enforcement and family separation, has for years been contracting a US surveillance company to intercept peoples’ communications across the United States.

The wide potential scope for the use of the powers raises concerns about their use for the real-time surveillance of people, families, and communities caught up in Trump’s immigration crackdown, including in sanctuary cities that have otherwise limited the extent to which local law enforcement are allowed to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

In 2014, US-based surveillance and analytics company, JSI Telecom, signed a contract with ICE worth over $19.7 million for annual support, operation, and maintenance of its “Title III digital collection system”, according to US procurement records. The latest contract is due to end in January 2020.

The enforcement agency intercepts wire, oral, and electronic communications—which includes the contents of calls, text messages, and emails—pursuant to judicial orders issued under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Acts of 1968 and subsequent amendments.

A judge can issue such an order when there is probable cause to believe that particular people committed particular felony offenses. Since 2014, federal and state authorities have submitted 14,683 applications for wiretap orders to judges, who have granted all but three of them.

How broad is the scope of ICE's surveillance? Very broad:

Such a wide scope raises huge concerns that judges and authorities could use such orders to monitor and criminalise millions of Americans, including almost six million citizen children under the age of 18 living with a parent or family member who is undocumented. ICE has said it deported 256,000 people in 2018, a record amount, including 5,571 unaccompanied children. ICE is also known to be monitoring people sympathetic to enforcing immigrants’ rights, labelling them as “Anti-Trump” protestors. It was reported earlier this week that ICE is locking up thousands of people it has detained in solitary confinement by exploiting measures supposed to be used as a last resort.

JSI Telecom, a company you've likely never heard of, is a big deal in the government-corporate surveillance game:

JSI Telecom, which describes itself as a “leading provider of communications intercept collection solution”, is one of over 500 companies worldwide which profits from governments' demand for advanced surveillance tools. In addition to ICE, JSI has surveillance contracts with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It has also received payments from the State Department for projects in Guatemala and Indonesia, part of a broader programme of US agencies using aid and other public money to empower foreign security agencies with surveillance capabilities.

ICE also buys big data datasets from major third-party data aggregators like the news organization Thomson Reuters:

Last year, media multinational Thomson Reuters defended its contracts with ICE after Privacy International highlighted the company had made nearly $50 million from selling the agency access to a “vast collection of public and proprietary records”. This includes phone records, consumer and credit bureau data, healthcare provider content, utilities data, DMV records, World-Check listings, business data, data from social networks and chatrooms, and “live access to more than 7 billion license plate detections”.

Big data and its abuse is not your friend. It's used by the powerful for the obvious purpose, to suppress and arrest their enemies. But it's also used for a more insidious purpose — to influence U.S. elections in their favor.

Yes, there are now several ways to buy elections. Directly purchasing candidates is just one of them. Pervasive, unnoticed, constant, soft propaganda, visited on the whole population to promote the candidates and causes of the wealthy, is another.

Welcome to the world that Americans continue to allow themselves to live within.