Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the militarized federal organization tasked with rounding up legally protected asylum seekers and demanding “self-deportation,” runs on data. ICE intakes massive amounts of data, from traffic cameras to cell phone location data to tips from wannabe politicians, that it uses to justify and target the truly massive scale of its harassment. Now, the organization is getting even more tech: A cell phone app that can scan license plates, and match them to all sorts of data obtained from brokers.
404 Media broke the story on the new ICE app, entitled Mobile Companion, which pairs photos of license plates to data from Motorola Solutions and Thompson Reuters. It uses Motorola’s vast network of license plate-scanning cameras to track where a vehicle has been and frequently goes, along with other vehicles that frequently travel with it, and pairs that with Thompson Reuters’ access to driver’s license information, Experian credit reports, marriage records, voter information, and more. ICE officers can now take a single picture of your license plate and learn all about you — your commute, your friends, your spouse, and all sorts of other information. Reuters had a bit of a confusing statement for 404 Media:
In an email, a Thomson Reuters spokesperson said “Mobile Companion has no relation to CLEAR,” despite the material explaining in detail how users can enrich Motorola’s license plate data with CLEAR’s. The spokesperson added “There is no data in Mobile Companion that requires a search warrant to access.” Motorola did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
On its website, Thomson Reuters markets CLEAR as a tool that has saved an abducted baby, identified a wanted man, and caught a sexual predator. The marketing makes no mention of its tech being specifically used by ICE’s deportation arm.
This is bad, if that wasn’t obvious
This massive data hoard is, of course, not limited to information on undocumented immigrants — after all, anyone with a driver’s license and a credit report is pretty definitively not “undocumented” in any meaningful sense of the term. The Department of Homeland Security tracks immigrants’ known contacts, including friends, and the “convoy” feature of this new app seems to expand that purview. Cars frequently seen with vehicles that ICE suspects are operated by immigrants are suddenly opened up for scrutiny, which means coworkers, roommates, or even neighbors are on the table.
Proponents of this mass data gathering will argue that they personally have nothing to hide, as if they’ve never broken the law, wronged another person, or disagreed with anyone in power once in their lives. This kind of data aggregation fundamentally flies in the face of our right to privacy, a right that should be afforded to all. Are mass arrests, mostly without any charges ever being filed, really worth never having privacy again?
