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ICE and CBP are using facial recognition technology to facilitate President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. With a smartphone app, immigration officers can scan faces of people they encounter and quickly search those faces against 200 million images stored in several government databases that are “notoriously error-filled,” according to Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “It’s being used on the street in ways that are dangerous, that are totally unprecedented in this country, and that are, frankly, blatantly illegal,” he adds.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to the facial recognition technology widely being used by ICE and CBP agents to facilitate President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The smartphone app is called Mobile Fortify. Its existence was first reported by 404 Media last summer. With the app, immigration officers can scan faces of people they encounter and quickly search those faces against 200 million images stored in several government databases. According to a lawsuit brought by Illinois and Chicago earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security has used the Mobile Fortify app in the field more than 100,000 times since it was launched.
But is the app even accurate? And is it constitutional for government agents to scan people’s faces without consent? Senate Democrats last month requested more information about the app from DHS, saying, in part, quote, “Even when accurate, this type of on-demand surveillance threatens the privacy and free speech [rights] of everyone in the United States.”
For more, we’re joined here in studio by Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, focuses on litigation and advocacy around surveillance and privacy issues.
Nate, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Explain what this technology, what this app is.
NATHAN FREED WESSLER: This is a facial recognition app that’s loaded onto the smartphones that DHS agents, ICE and CBP agents, are carrying with them. It links into a giant database of photos of people — as you said, more than 200 million photos — and into voluminous federal databases, that include immigration-related records, border crossing records, purported criminal records. Some of these databases are notoriously error-filled. And it’s being used on the street in ways that are dangerous, that are totally unprecedented in this country, and that are, frankly, blatantly illegal. It’s being used on U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents. It’s being used indiscriminately by masked federal agents without people’s consent, without a way to say no, in ways that are really harming people every day.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, I’m thinking about the recent arrest of the attorney and minister, Levy Armstrong, who, when she was arrested — and they admitted that they changed her face, made her cry as she was being taken away, though she wasn’t. Her lawyer said there was one ICE agent just filming her face.
NATHAN FREED WESSLER: Yeah, you know, we see a few different things happening in parallel here, and they’re all related. We see, during the so-called immigration stops and detentions, ICE and CBP agents using this face recognition app, even to the exclusion of people showing — trying to show documentary evidence of citizenship. We also see these federal agents filming and harassing protesters, filming and harassing people who are just trying to record what’s going on in their neighborhoods. We don’t know the degree to which they’re using face recognition technology there, but they are certainly going way beyond the bounds of what people’s protected rights are.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Ken Klippenstein, the journalist, sharing a video on social media last week of an exchange between a legal observer in Maine and an immigration agent she’s recording. The video begins with the agent photographing the observer’s license plate. Here’s the exchange.
LEGAL OBSERVER: It’s not illegal to record.
ICE AGENT: Yeah, exactly.
LEGAL OBSERVER: Yeah.
ICE AGENT: That’s what we’re doing.
LEGAL OBSERVER: Yeah. Why are you taking my information down?
ICE AGENT: Because we have a nice little database.
LEGAL OBSERVER: Oh, good.
ICE AGENT: And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So, have fun with that.
LEGAL OBSERVER: For videotaping you? Are you crazy?
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Nate Freed Wessler?
NATHAN FREED WESSLER: I want to be very clear here, because the law is completely clear. The First Amendment to our Constitution protects your right to record law enforcement and government agents doing their jobs in public. That’s a core protection for accountability, so that we can know what the government is doing and when it is violating the law. Retribution against people for doing that violates the Constitution. It’s illegal. And we, at the ACLU and as a nation, won’t stand for it.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what can you do about it? Apparently, that this app, you can — they’re keeping photos up to 15 years?
NATHAN FREED WESSLER: That’s right. This is — it’s totally unprecedented. You know, police around the country have been using face recognition in a different way — right? — in investigations where there’s an image of a suspect. And we know of numerous wrongful arrests from that use, because this technology is glitchy. It gets it wrong a lot. And it gets it wrong particularly often when used on people of color, darker-skinned people. Of course, who are these masked federal agents grabbing off the street? People of color. They’re racial profiling. They’re taking people based only on the color of their skin and then using this very glitchy app to try to identify them and match them to immigration records. And we know it makes errors. We’ve actually seen that.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about the 20-year-old Somali American U.S. citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen.
NATHAN FREED WESSLER: This is a client of the ACLU in a lawsuit that we brought on his behalf and a class of residents in Minnesota who have been subjected to unconstitutional and illegal stops and detentions by ICE. There are a number of violations that he and our other clients have suffered. But one of them is that our client, a U.S. citizen, was grabbed for no reason other than, we think, the color of his skin by federal agents. He repeatedly insisted that he was a U.S. citizen, repeatedly asked to be able to show them his U.S. passport card — right? — which would show his status. They refused to look at any documentary evidence. They shoved him in a car. They drove him to a facility. They insisted, after he tried to resist over and over, on scanning his face with this dangerous technology. And only after he finally had his face scanned and finally convinced them to look at his passport card, they let him go. Now, mind you, they had driven him seven miles to the outskirts of Minneapolis, let him go in a Minnesota winter, told him to walk back to his office. Luckily, his family was desperately trying to find him and was on their way already to this federal office to see if he was there, and he got a ride home. But it was completely terrifying, complete violation of his rights. And this is happening every day to people in Minneapolis and around the country.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us. And people can go to our website at democracynow.org to see that video as he was pushed into the snow, as he was brutalized, and then just released far away from where he was. Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
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Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Our reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most pressing issues. On Democracy Now!, you’ll hear a diversity of voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes provocative perspective on global events.