"Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is on a surveillance spending spree:
The agency is using much of its windfall from this summer's One Big, Beautiful Bill Act to fund a major expansion of biometric identification, cellphone tracking and other electronic capabilities, Axios' Brittany Gibson reports.
Why it matters: The megabill's $75 billion cash infusion for ICE was sold by Congress as a way to speed up hiring new agents and adding detention space. But ICE is also going big on surveillance.
The new surveillance spending includes:
A contract with Clearview AI, which provides a facial recognition algorithm.
A multimillion-dollar contract with BI for its biometric data system IRIS, which promises a real-time identification of a person after taking a photo of their eye, according to the company website.
A restarted contract with Paragon Solutions, which provides software that can remotely access smartphone data, as The Washington Post reported. The Biden administration had banned Paragon as an unethical spyware company.
Buying access to a real-time smartphone location tracking system from the digital intelligence company Penlink, as 404 Media reported.
Cooper Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit, said ICE could say: "Who owns all of the phones that have been outside of the ICE facility every night for the last three nights? And let's send them all to HSI for investigation." HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) is the investigative arm of ICE."
Axios
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