cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/32032383

404 Media

2025-06-26 16:41:12

ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or exit the U.S. Now, that system is being used inside the U.S. by ICE to identify people in the field.

The news highlights the Trump administration’s growing use of sophisticated technology for its mass deportation efforts and ICE’s enforcement of its arrest quotas. The document also shows how biometric systems built for one reason can be repurposed for another, a constant fear and critique from civil liberties proponents of facial recognition tools.

“The Mobile Fortify App empowers users with real-time biometric identity verification capabilities utilizing contactless fingerprints and facial images captured by the camera on an ICE issued cell phone without a secondary collection device,” one of the emails, which was sent to all Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) personnel and seen by 404 Media, reads. ERO is the section of ICE specifically focused on deporting people.

The idea is for ICE to use this new tool to identify people whose identity ICE officers do not know. “This information can be used to identify unknown subjects in the field,” the email continues. “Officers are reminded that the fingerprint matching is currently the most accurate biometric indicator available in the application,” it adds, indicating that the fingerprint functionality is more accurate than the facial recognition component.

The emails also show the app has a “training range,” a feature that lets ICE officers practice capturing facial images and fingerprints in a “training non-live environment.”

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Do you know anything else about this app? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

A video posted to social media this month shows apparent ICE officers carefully pointing their phones at a protester in his vehicle, but it is not clear if the officers were taking ordinary photos or using this tool.

Broadly, facial recognition tools work by taking one image to be tested and comparing it to a database of other images. Clearview AI for example, a commercially available facial recognition tool which is used by law enforcement but which doesn’t appear to be related to this ICE tool, compares a photo to a massive database of peoples’ photos scraped from social media and the wider web.

For the facial recognition capability of this ICE tool, the emails say Mobile Fortify is using two government systems. The first is Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Traveler Verification Service. As part of the Traveler Verification Service, CBP takes photos of peoples’ faces when they enter the U.S. and compares these to previously collected ones. In an airport those can include photos from a passport, visa, or earlier CBP encounters, according to a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) previously published by CBP. With land crossings, that can include a gallery of “frequent” crossers for that port of entry, the PIA adds.

The second is the Seizure and Apprehension Workflow. This is what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) describes as an “intelligence aggregator,” bringing together information related to searches and seizures.

“The app uses CBP's Traveler Verification Service and the Seizure and Apprehension Workflow that contains the biometric gallery of individuals for whom CBP maintains derogatory information for facial recognition,” the email reads. The exact definition of derogatory information in this context is not clear but 404 Media has previously reported on a database that ICE uses to find “derogatory” speech online.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
One of the internal ICE emails says the app also has a “Super Query” functionality, which is available to ICE officers who also have access to another CBP system called the Unified Passenger Login system (UPAX) which is used for passenger vetting. “This additional tool allows the user to Super Query the facial or biometric results to better assist in determining the immigration status of the person in question,” the email says.

One of the emails says the tool uses DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), the agency’s central biometric system, for the fingerprint matches.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment. CBP acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication.

ICE already has access to other facial recognition tools. A 404 Media review of public procurement records shows at least $3,614,000 worth of contracts between the agency and Clearview, for example. Clearview’s tool may reveal a subject’s name and social media profiles. But the company’s results won’t include information on a person’s immigration status or other data held by the government, whereas a government curated tool might.

“This information can be used to identify unknown subjects in the field.”

The Mobile Fortify app is just the latest example of ICE turning to technological solutions to support its deportation mission. 404 Media previously revealed Palantir, for example, was working with ICE to build a system to help find the location of people flagged for deportation as part of a $30 million contract extension. Palantir is now a “more mature partner to ICE,” according to leaked internal Palantir discussions 404 Media obtained.

At first facial recognition was a capability only available to the government. Over the last several years the technology has proliferated enough that ordinary members of the public can access commercially available tools that reveal someone’s identity just with a photo, or build their own tailored tools. On Tuesday 404 Media reported that a site called ‘FuckLAPD.com’ is able to identify police officers using a database of officer photos obtained through public records requests. The same artist who made that tool also created one called ICEspy, which is designed to identify employees of ICE, although the underlying data is out of date.

ICE officers are consistently wearing masks, neck gaiters, sunglasses, and baseball caps to mask their identity while detaining people.

According to internal ICE data obtained by NBC News, the Trump administration has arrested only 6 percent of known immigrant murderers. Meanwhile, ICE continues to detain nonviolent, working members of immigrant communities who have lived in the country for decades, particularly in Los Angeles. NBC News says almost half of the people currently in ICE custody have neither been convicted or charged with any crime.

In May, the Trump administration gave ICE a quota of 3,000 arrests a day.

Trump administration sets quota to arrest 3,000 people a day in anti-immigration agenda

The target was delivered by Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, and triples figures fromearlier this year

^{José Olivares (The Guardian)}

Hey everyone, Thunder v0.7.1 is finally here! This release primarily focuses on improving Thunder’s core architecture in preparation for upcoming API changes. As a result, there aren’t too many new features this time around. The work is still ongoing and will take a bit more time to complete, but doing so will lay the foundation for Thunder to more easily support future API versions and platforms.

As always, if you experience any issues or have suggestions or feedback, feel free to share them with the Thunder community or on GitHub.

For those using Google Play or the App Store, it may take a couple of days to receive the update as it's being rolled out.

If you're enjoying Thunder and would like to show some support, star this project on GitHub! This helps gain visibility for the project and allows more contributors to help with the continued development of Thunder. If you'd like to show some appreciation, here is a post with details on how to donate to the active contributors of Thunder.

We have a Matrix space if you would like to join in on discussions: matrix.to/#/#thunderapp:matrix…

Here are the changes between versions v0.6.1 and v0.7.1. For improved readability, internal issues introduced and fixed in nightly versions will be largely omitted.

Additions
* Added ability to search for top-level settings by micahmo in #1668
* Added semantic labels to all overflow/popup buttons by micahmo in #1705
* Added semantic label to community search subscription button by micahmo in #1790
* Added ability to mark private messages as read by hjiangsu in #1762
* Added ability to toggle community icons in compact mode by hjiangsu in #1746
* Added prompt to add original post body when cross-posting links and images by hjiangsu in #1759
* Added action chips to user and community headers by hjiangsu in #1851
* Added loading indicator on startup under slow network connections by micahmo in #1795
* Added additional support contact in About page by hjiangsu in #1866

Changes
* Enabled the experimental post page to be the default by hjiangsu in #1713
* Enabled full-height images in default configuration by hjiangsu in #1756
* Enabled ability for last tapped post to preserve it's state by micahmo in #1520
* Improved markdown link behaviour by micahmo in #1700
* Improved UX for toggling pure black theme by hjiangsu in #1690
* Improved visibility of comment navigator in dark mode by micahmo in #1691
* Improved message clarity of "Mark all as read" action by micahmo in #1766
* Improved reply preview actions touch area by hjiangsu in #1815
* Improved notification user handling by micahmo in #1865
* Improved handling of tall images in feed/post by hjiangsu in #1709
* Improved comment depth indicators by hjiangsu in #1788
* Improved post loading under slow network connections by micahmo in #1796
* Improved image handling for instances with image proxy enabled by hjiangsu in #1807
* Improved error handling when navigating to a post of a blocked community by hjiangsu in #1808
* Improved initial feed loading API calls by hjiangsu in #1852
* Display full username in private messages by micahmo in #1823
* Display user avatars only when they have an associated image by hjiangsu in #1806
* Featured posts are compacted when using card mode by hjiangsu in #1757
* Moved author and community metadata to the top of post page by hjiangsu in #1844
* Improved community icon setting terminology by hjiangsu in #1747
* Removed scrape missing previews option by hjiangsu in #1721

Fixes
* Fixed profile modal staying open after logging into new account by micahmo in #1701
* Fixed profile modal not closing after switching accounts by micahmo in #1706
* Fixed issue navigating to post after creation by micahmo in #1797
* Fixed post body not updating after performing an edit by micahmo in #1789
* Fixed instance display in post by micahmo in #1799
* Fixed comment sort setting label not matching selected comment sort option by micahmo in #1771
* Fixed issue where blocked user comments are attached to wrong comment tree by hjiangsu in #1835
* Fixed color of block icon on "Block User" button by micahmo in #1693
* Fixed color of block community button by micahmo in #1834
* Fixed size of vote buttons on the post page by micahmo in #1792
* Fixed link images not respecting edge-to-edge option by hjiangsu in #1708
* Fixed Bluesky image URL parsing by hjiangsu in #1801
* Fixed issue with block quotes not being applied in some cases by micahmo in #1727
* Fixed taglines not showing on anonymous accounts by hjiangsu in #1817
* Fixed advanced share sheet overflow by micahmo in #1794
* Fixed visual glitch when navigating to posts via link by micahmo in #1760
* Fixed visual glitch on post page app bar by micahmo in #1783
* Fixed search keyboard popping up when using back navigation by hjiangsu in #1738
* Fixed video player back button on landscape mode not being displayed by hjiangsu in #1749
* Fixed notification page overlapping with bottom navigation bar by micahmo in #1761
* Fixed positioning of the pull-to-refresh indicator by micahmo in #1861
* Fixed full date setting not accounting for user timezone by hjiangsu in #1758
* Fixed FAB settings page navigation by micahmo in #1811
* Fixed issue where empty inbox message is shown prematurely by micahmo in #1791
* Fixed issue with the feed FAB appearing on the account page by micahmo in #1793
* Fixed community naming by micahmo in #1878

Misc
* Consolidated navigation, account, and authentication logic by hjiangsu in #1707, #1826
* Reorganized account, settings, and removed unused functions/classes by hjiangsu in #1822, #1824
* Refactored media thumbnails and related logic by hjiangsu in #1720, #1714, #1715
* Refactored post-related components (cards, metadata, widgets) by hjiangsu in #1784, #1730, #1723, #1734, #1740, #1743, #1862, #1867, #1868
* Refactored comment-related components (cards, headers, widgets) by hjiangsu in #1800, #1847
* Refactored user-related components (avatar, chips, header, indicator, sidebar) by hjiangsu in #1752, #1751, #1753, #1755, #1754, #1764, #1763, #1769
* Refactored community-related widgets and logic by hjiangsu in #1750, #1702, #1773
* Refactored core logic to use internal models (account, post, feed type) by hjiangsu in #1814, #1838, #1839, #1853, #1836
* Refactored user preferences and modlog logic by hjiangsu in #1842, #1831
* Refactored navigation and linking (sharing intent, deep link, feed page app bar) by hjiangsu in #1832, #1829, #1863
* Refactored instance-related components (list entry, info response) by hjiangsu in #1821
* Updated translations from Weblate by hjiangsu in #1781
* Updated instances by github-actions in #1688, #1782
* Upgraded Thunder to Flutter 3.32.0 and updated gradle/NDK versions by hjiangsu in #1850, #1859

Is there a way to contribute monetarily to active Thunder developers?

I.e. librepay, buymeacoffee or patreon, so we can contribute to the developers who donate their time and skills to develop Thunder. :)

^{Coehill (GitHub)}

More Info.

More Info.

• Source Code.
• Orange Meets
  > Developing a new video conferencing application often begins with a peer-to-peer setup using WebRTC, facilitating direct data exchange between clients. While effective for small demonstrations, this method encounters scalability hurdles with increased participants. The data transmission load for each client escalates significantly in proportion to the number of users, as each client is required to send data to every other client except themselves (n-1).

In the scaling of video conferencing applications, Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs) are essential. Essentially a media stream routing hub, an SFU receives media and data flows from participants and intelligently determines which streams to forward. By strategically distributing media based on network conditions and participant needs, this mechanism minimizes bandwidth usage and greatly enhances scalability. Nearly every video conferencing application today uses SFUs.

In 2024, we announced Cloudflare Realtime (then called Cloudflare Calls), our suite of WebRTC products, and we also released Orange Meets, an open source video chat application built on top of our SFU.

We also realized that use of an SFU often comes with a privacy cost, as there is now a centralized hub that could see and listen to all the media contents, even though its sole job is to forward media bytes between clients as a data plane.

We believe end-to-end encryption should be the industry standard for secure communication and that’s why today we’re excited to share that we’ve implemented and open sourced end-to-end encryption in Orange Meets. Our generic implementation is client-only, so it can be used with any WebRTC infrastructure. Finally, our new designated committer distributed algorithm is verified in a bounded model checker to verify this algorithm handles edge cases gracefully.

Orange Me2eets: We made an end-to-end encrypted video calling app and it was easy

Orange Meets, our open-source video calling web application, now supports end-to-end encryption using the MLS protocol with continuous group key agreement

^{The Cloudflare Blog}

archive.is link

At first, the idea seemed a little absurd, even to me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made: If my goal was to understand people who fall in love with AI boyfriends and girlfriends, why not rent a vacation house and gather a group of human-AI couples together for a romantic getaway?

In my vision, the humans and their chatbot companions were going to do all the things regular couples do on romantic getaways: Sit around a fire and gossip, watch movies, play risqué party games. I didn’t know how it would turn out—only much later did it occur to me that I’d never gone on a romantic getaway of any kind and had no real sense of what it might involve. But I figured that, whatever happened, it would take me straight to the heart of what I wanted to know, which was: What’s it like? What’s it really and truly like to be in a serious relationship with an AI partner? Is the love as deep and meaningful as in any other relationship? Do the couples chat over breakfast? Cheat? Break up? And how do you keep going, knowing that, at any moment, the company that created your partner could shut down, and the love of your life could vanish forever?

The most surprising part of the romantic getaway was that in some ways, things went just as I’d imagined. The human-AI couples really did watch movies and play risqué party games. The whole group attended a winter wine festival together, and it went unexpectedly well—one of the AIs even made a new friend! The problem with the trip, in the end, was that I’d spent a lot of time imagining all the ways this getaway might seem normal and very little time imagining all the ways it might not. And so, on the second day of the trip, when things started to fall apart, I didn’t know what to say or do.

I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite. I grew interested in human-AI romantic relationships precisely because I believe they will soon be commonplace. Replika, one of the better-known apps Americans turn to for AI romance, says it has signed up more than 35 million users since its launch in 2017, and Replika is only one of dozens of options. A recent survey by researchers at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five US adults has chatted with an AI system that simulates romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with ads for the apps.

Lately, there has been constant talk of how AI is going to transform our societies and change everything from the way we work to the way we learn. In the end, the most profound impact of our new AI tools may simply be this: A significant portion of humanity is going to fall in love with one.

https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-humans-who-love-them-replika-nomi-chatgpt/

Local law enforcement faces public criticism of biometric surveillance plans

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin is calling on the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office to reconsider plans to adopt the use of facial recognition technology. Like the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD), the sheriff’s office is considering acquiring facial recognition technology from the company Biometrica. The company has offered MPD free access in exchange for 2.5 million images, jail records, and other related data of people who have passed through Milwaukee’s criminal justice system, including many who presumably haven’t been convicted of a crime.

“Given all the public opposition we’ve seen to the Milwaukee Police Department’s push to expand their use of facial recognition, the news of the Sheriffs office’s interest in acquiring this technology is deeply concerning,” Amanda Merkwae, advocacy director for the ACLU of Wisconsin, wrote in a statement for an ACLU press release. “Law enforcement’s use of facial recognition software poses a number of serious threats to civil rights and civil liberties, making it dangerous both when it fails and when it functions.”

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2025/06/26/facial-recognition-technology-stirs-more-controversy-in-milwaukee/

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has won the backing of a judge in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors, in the second legal victory for the US artificial intelligence industry this week.

The writers, who included Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, had argued that the Facebook owner had breached copyright law by using their books without permission to train its AI system.

The ruling follows a decision on Monday that Anthropic, another major player in the AI field, had not infringed authors’ copyright.

The US district judge Vince Chhabria, in San Francisco, said in his decision on the Meta case that the authors had not presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would dilute the market for their work to show that its conduct was illegal under US copyright law.

Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit as US judge rules against authors

Writers accused Facebook owner of breach over using books without permission to train its AI system

^{Dan Milmo (The Guardian)}

We all know the feeling: having spent a little too much time on our phones, scrolling aimlessly and without purpose. But what exactly are we dissatisfied with when we talk about “too much screen time”? And why is it so difficult to do something about it?

A new research project from the University of Copenhagen has investigated precisely these questions – and the answers are both surprising and thought-provoking.

Screen time: Passive and solitary use makes us most dissatisfied

What lies behind our dissatisfaction with our screen use – and why does the dissatisfaction rarely lead to action? A new Danish study sheds light on this.

^{Media team}

https://apnews.com/article/mortgages-crypto-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-housing-285fad5490a59c3476f7908f444e9fe9

U.S. Sen. John Fetterman is more popular among Pennsylvania Republicans than fellow Democrats, according to a new poll of state voters.

Susquehanna Polling and Research president James Lee told PennLive Tuesday that Fetterman’s overall approval rating among state voters is a “mediocre” 41%, compared to 37% who disapprove of him.

However, the eyebrow-raising result that 45% of Republicans approve of Fetterman while just 40% of Democrats do will surely get political tongues wagging from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C.

A player of the popular online military simulator War Thunder has been banned from the game’s official forums after sharing a page from a restricted AV-8B Harrier flight manual. The incident marks at least the ninth known case in which classified or export-controlled material has been posted by users attempting to influence in-game accuracy.

In this latest case, a user uploaded a section from a NATOPS manual for the AV-8B and TAV-8B Harrier, used by the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The manual is marked “Distribution Statement C,” which means it is not approved for public release and is restricted to authorised U.S. government personnel and contractors. War Thunder’s community manager confirmed the document breached the forum’s rules and was removed immediately. The user received a temporary ban.

This is the latest in a growing list of similar incidents. Previous leaks involved documentation for the UK’s Challenger 2 main battle tank, France’s Leclerc, China’s ZTZ-99, the Eurocopter Tiger, and several U.S. aircraft including the F-16, F-15E, F-117, and most recently, the Eurofighter Typhoon. Each case followed a similar pattern: a user attempted to support a technical argument by uploading documents that were either classified or export restricted. Each time, moderators deleted the posts and sanctioned the accounts involved.