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ICE Used Facial Recognition to Mine State Driver’s License Databases

posted by martyb on Monday July 08 2019, @01:39PM   
from the Big-Brother-keeps-getting-bigger dept.

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow1944:

ICE Used Facial Recognition to Mine State Driver's License Databases

WASHINGTON — Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have mined state driver's license databases using facial recognition technology, analyzing millions of motorists' photos without their knowledge.

In at least three states that offer driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, ICE officials have requested to comb through state repositories of license photos, according to newly released documents. At least two of those states, Utah and Vermont, complied, searching their photos for matches, those records show.

In the third state, Washington, agents authorized administrative subpoenas of the Department of Licensing to conduct a facial recognition scan of all photos of license applicants, though it was unclear whether the state carried out the searches. In Vermont, agents only had to file a paper request that was later approved by Department of Motor Vehicles employees.

The documents, obtained through public records requests by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology and first reported on by The Washington Post, mark the first known instance of ICE using facial recognition technology to scan state driver's license databases, including photos of legal residents and citizens.

Privacy experts like Harrison Rudolph, an associate at the center, which released the documents to The New York Times, said the records painted a new picture of a practice that should be shut down.

[...] He continued: "These states have never told undocumented people that when they apply for a driver's license they are also turning over their face to ICE. That is a huge bait and switch."

The use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement is far from new or rare. Over two dozen states allow law enforcement officials to request such searches against their databases of driver's licenses, a practice that has drawn criticism from lawmakers and advocates who say that running facial recognition searches against millions of photos of unwitting, law-abiding citizens is a major privacy violation.

The F.B.I., for example, has tapped state law enforcement's troves of photos — primarily those for driver's licenses and visa applications — for nearly a decade, according to a Government Accountability Office report. The bureau has run over 390,000 searches through databases that collectively hold over 640 million photos, F.B.I. officials said.

[...] The Seattle Times reported last year that Washington State's Department of Licensing turned over undocumented immigrants' driver's license applications to ICE officials, a practice its governor, Jay Inslee, pledged to stop. And a lawsuit in Vermont filed by an activist group cited documents obtained under public records law that showed that the state Department of Motor Vehicles forwarded names, photos, car registrations and other information on migrant workers to ICE, Vermont Public Radio reported this year.

The relationship between Washington's Department of Licensing and ICE officials may prove to be particularly interesting to privacy experts because of a law the State Legislature passed in 2012 stipulating that the department could use a facial recognition matching system for driver's licenses only when authorized by a court order, something ICE did not provide.

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Original Submission

• Re:If you are here illegally, you may get caught Re:If you are here illegally, you may get caught (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:50AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @12:50AM (#864792)

  This discussion is so godwinned its ridiculous. It's douple-plus-hyperbolic to compare what's going on to gas chambers and nazis without even giving a nod to the fact that there are downsides to open borders. Here's an example of how reasoned argument might look, taken from an article written by a Canadian Anthropologist (so probably not a "nazi" *eyeroll*): https://zeroanthropology.net/2016/12/26/open-borders-global-citizenship-and-the-working-class/ [zeroanthropology.net]

  The discussion centers on a book by Andrew Kipnis in which Kipnis advocates for open borders:

  “Imagine,” Kipnis asks: “What, then, could a world with global citizenship or, more modestly, less restrictive immigration laws be like?” (2004, p. 270). He focuses in particular on what he sees as the problem of “denying the considerable economic benefits of first world citizenship for most of the world’s population” (2004, p. 270). Instead of foreign aid programs, citizens from nations previously receiving such aid should instead be allowed to migrate to the aid-donating country. So instead of the US sending development or humanitarian aid to, say, Ethiopia, it would instead issue an open invitation to Ethiopians to migrate to the US and take up US citizenship. It’s not “global citizenship” in the way some might understand it (as a “citizen of the world”); rather, it is specifically a call for an open borders policy among developed nations, that effectively entails a globalization of their own citizenship.

  So clearly Kipnis is also not a nazi. You can agree to that right? Even so, Kipnis is capable of recognizing there are costs:

  “I begin from the premise,” Kipnis writes, “that a more egalitarian immigration policy requires a willingness on the part of first world nations to tolerate a level of immigration that could lower current living standards. To the advantage of that nation’s wealthy and the disadvantage of its poor, wages, especially for unskilled jobs, might go down” (2004, p. 270). While wages, he maintains, would be depressed and heighten income inequality, that is not the only cost: “Schools, for many, could become more crowded. Tax burdens may rise, welfare benefits decrease, public parks and spaces become more crowded and shanty towns develop” (Kipnis, 2004, p. 270).

  Counterpoint:

  Where the argument takes an especially interesting turn is when Kipnis holds out the possibility that open migration policies could put a brake on one of neoliberal globalization’s worst outcomes: impoverished workers in the periphery subsidizing the competitiveness of exports through their low wages, wages held sufficiently low to wipe out industrial jobs in the core. Where capital is mobile but labour is not, then the power of labour to negotiate better terms for itself is annihilated.

  Rebuttal:

  The third problem with Kipnis’ attempt at a solution is that it involves accelerating the exploitation of native-born workers in places such as the US, which feeds into the politics of replaceability that has been so roundly rejected (not yet defeated) in the US and the UK. Kipnis’ plan which knowingly transfers the costs of openness to the working class, which will inevitably heighten conflict, is not a workable one.

  Notice the issue discussion in the article did not go like this:
  * Open boards gooood.
  - Maybe not.
  * You're a nazi.
  - Except it has this cost.
  * YOU ARE AN INFINITY NAZI!!!!

  ... because that's not argument. That's just being childish and moronic.

  Parent

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• Re:If you are here illegally, you may get caught (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:13AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:13AM (#864840)

  Fucking nazi! We are going to have to facial you!

  Parent