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.
“Face recognition technology is notoriously unreliable, frequently generating false matches and resulting in a number of known wrongful arrests across the country. Immigration agents relying on this technology to try to identify people on the street is a recipe for disaster. Congress has never authorized DHS to use face recognition technology in this way, and the agency should shut this dangerous experiment down,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media in an email.
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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.
“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.
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ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show
The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops
A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”
“Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead,” the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer’s face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. “Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match,” the site says.
“fucklapd.com uses data provided by the City of Los Angeles directly to the public,” McDonald told me in an email. “This data has been provided in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits. That means all of this information belongs to the public and is a matter of public record. fucklapd.com is not scraping any data.”
In addition to potentially identifying officers by name and serial number, FuckLAPD.com also pulls up a police officer’s salary.
“Surprisingly it [the domain name] only costs $10 a year to exercise my first amendment right to say fucklapd.com,” McDonald said.
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I tested the tools by grabbing an image of a white and bald police officer from an LAPD press conference addressing its use of force during the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. I uploaded the image to the site, and within a few seconds the site presented me with nine headshots of officers who could be possible matches, all of them bald white men. The first correctly identified the cop in the image I uploaded.Clicking “view profile” under the result sent me to the Watch the Watchers site by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community group based in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. “All of the information on this website comes from records that were deliberately made public by the City of Los Angeles in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits,” the Watch the Watchers site says. “We plan to keep refreshing this data from new public records requests as well as to add other data.” Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is not associated with FuckLAPD.com and did not endorse the site.
McDonald told me that since the site launched, it had around 50,000 visitors, but “Because the analysis happens on-device I have no way of knowing what people are using it for, except for some people who have posted screenshots to Twitter or Instagram,” he said.
In 2018 McDonald made another tool called ICEspy which used hundreds of photos of ICE employees from LinkedIn and does much the same thing as FuckLAPD.com. “This app is designed to highlight and embarrass the organization committing atrocities against refugees and immigrants to the United States,” ICEspy’s website says. That tool originally used a Microsoft API, before Microsoft restricted access to it. McDonald said on X that he recently relaunched the tool to run locally on devices. 404 Media tested ICEspy using images of ICE employees on LinkedIn to verify if the tool worked and each result was incorrect; McDonald indicated on X he was looking for others to re-scrape LinkedIn and update the database.
Over the last few months ICE officers have consistently worn masks, neck gaiters, sunglasses, and baseball caps to shield their identity while often refusing to provide their name or even confirm the agency they belong to. This includes while violently assaulting people, detaining U.S. citizens, and pointing weapons at bystanders, leaving little room for recourse or accountability against the individual agents or the agency.
ICE’s constant use of masks has created a climate where people cannot be sure that the heavily armed group of men coming towards them are really federal agents or not. In Philadelphia, a man pretended to be an ICE agent in order to rob an auto repair shop and zip tie an employee. In Brooklyn, a man posed as an immigration officer before attempting to rape a woman.
ICE claims that assaults against its officers have increased by 413 percent, and use this as the justification for covering their faces. But as Philip Bump showed in the Washington Postthere are still plenty of questions about those numbers and their accuracy. ICE says its officers’ family members have been doxed too.
Neither the LAPD or ICE responded to a request for comment.
Joseph Cox contributed reporting.
Woman says man posed as ICE agent before attempted rape in Brooklyn
A 51-year-old woman was approached by a man who said he was an ICE agent before attempting to sexually assault her.Eyewitness News (ABC7 New York)
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