ICE, CBP Knew Facial Recognition App Couldn't Do What DHS Says It Could
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
If you think carrying a form of ID or passport will save you from ICE, I just want you to imagine a scenario where you are alone with several federal agents who, when provided with your proof of citizenship, light it on fire with a match and throw you in a van. Papers are just physical objects and unless ICE is wearing 24/7 streaming body cams, the above scenario could happen to literally anyone.
Readers, whatever you're doing right now is what you would be doing during the rise of Nazi Germany... Be kind, be a good neighbor, don't talk to cops.
There was a local incident where ICE drove erratically to make it look as though a legal observer initiated a crash. They then called and lied to the local police department. The activist was then released when he provided dash cam footage proving that they lied about the incident. https://lataco.com/oxnard-dash-cam-ice-crash
That is true.
If you're in the US and you're not in the signal chats or whatever that would alert you when ICE is working then you're not doing all the things that you could do to prevent this pronounced move towards fascism that will impact you personally and deeply.
This is not activism as charity- people need to understand that we are still in a spot where we may be able to push back, and that should be understood as simple self-interest.
Even if you're not in a place "under siege" they are working where you are living.
Consider that if you're in some rural place or even a place where they feel "at home" your work is going to be more impactful by definition:
- find your local immigrant's rights group that is watching out for ICE - get trained by them how to be a "responder" - slot in and help where you can.
The cops are issuing a citation, which you can contest in a court with a reference to that agency record. ICE has a habit of snatching people off the streets and stashing them in not-quite-black sites in Texas or Florida until they can book them on a private airplane to Guatemala.
Given than upwards of 20 million people walked across the southern border in the last administration that a disproportionate amount of those people are non-white... but that doesn't mean that deportations in and of themselves are driven by race at all.
Beyond any of that, you seem to have a level of bias that is well out of touch with reality and your paranoia seems to be highly unfounded by the reality of the levels of deportation of the current administration even compared to the administrations since the turn of the century, especially offset to the number of illegal entries released into the interior of the US over that same time period.
Kavanaugh stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/us/politics/trump-refugee...
The other countries I’ve traveled to just adopted with broadly without any discussion of privacy, just a “look how convenient this is!!”
My country isn't perfect but at least we keep the racists, fascists and religious nut cases in line.
> "I don't feel safe entering the US anymore"
> "Other countries do facial recognition too"
You see how the two statements are not directly linked.
Article is about facial recognition.
Comments says "I'm scared to go to the US because of...<article>"
I response with a comment about the facial recognition and how every other country I've been to does it, but for some bizarre reason, it's not those countries OP is worried about, it's the US.
It's cognitive dissonance.
Facial recognition is the use of the same technology to match a picture of your face to pictures in some face picture database in order to identify you, without the need of a passport or other photographic id. As the Wired article points out, this use case has a very high rate of failure "in the wild", i.e. with natural lighting conditions, varied body postures and facial accessories etc. There are a few police forces in certain countries that have adopted this tech, but it's not as widely deployed as facial verification.
The article above is complaining about the use of facial recognition. It's a bit confusing because the article keeps using the term "verification" as does the Wired article, but there's a clear description of matching a picture taken on the street to faces in a "database", and there's no mention of using the tech to match a person to the photo on their id, so that's facial recognition, not verification.
There's a serious issue of invasion of privacy from unchecked use of facial recognition. Unfortunately most people are not going to care much, like they didn't care much when e.g. the UK installed surveilance cameras [2] all over the place, and like they don't care much when Meta, Google, Amazon, and everyone else vacuums up their online behavioural patterns for targeted advertisement etc.
___________
[1] Twitter thread, can't find it now.
[2] Or so-called CCTV. Please excuse a long-ago Metal Gear Solid player a small terminological transgression.
There are many countries now that don't require a passport to enter - you can simply get a facial scan.
And even beyond that, the countries that do take a photo and compare with your passport and absolutely storing that photo and using it for whatever purpose they might have laid out.
So if the issue is that your privacy is being threatened due to a stored photo of you - that happens whether it's facial recognition or facial verification.
You're straw-manning here. The issue isn't privacy in a vacuum. The issue is very directly privacy in the context of the current US government being undeniably and intentionally malicious in a way that few countries anywhere in the world currently are. @YeGoblynQueenne indicates as much by saying "At the very least, in an EU country (and also the UK) you can ...".
The US government currently doesn't give a shit about the law or human rights in ways that are both completely unprecedented and very violent. People have concrete reason to fear the US government right now. That's what the article is about, not merely privacy on its own.
> There are many countries now that don't require a passport to enter - you can simply get a facial scan.
Name all the ones that violently assault and kill people in the street and imprison people for weeks or months or even years without formal charges and ignore court orders to release people who are being illegally imprisoned and then only later comply with the law after injurious delays with the most malicious interpretations if ever.
I'm not sure you know what "strawmanning" is.
You're making extraordinary claims with no evidence. That seems more like strawmanning.
> Name all the ones that violently assault and kill people in the street and imprison people for weeks or months or even years without formal charges
Huh? If you're talking about enforcing immigration laws, they all do. It's the US that is the odd outlier that doesn't enforce immigration laws.
It's very clear that you don't converse honestly in good faith when you choose to draw a false equivalence between "violently assault and kill people in the street and imprison people for weeks or months or even years without formal charges" and a mealy-mouthed "enforcing immigration laws". We're done here.
Usually big sport events are used to improve optics for authoritarian regimes, often outbidding well-functioning democracies. Quatar, China, Russia, Nazi Germany [1] to name a few. I think the world cup football is a welcome event, as it gives some 'normalcy' to the US regime, and legitimacy to their policies. It is interesting to study the history around [1], as not many things have changed how people approach these kinds of dilemmas.
Bush-Rove-Schwarzegnegger: https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/10/06/the-bush-rove-schwar... :
> According to [...], Rove’s grandfather was Karl Heinz Roverer, the Gauleiter of Oldenburg. Roverer was Reich-Statthalter—Nazi State Party Chairman—for his region. He was also a partner and senior engineer in the Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo A. G. engineering firm, which built the Birkenau death camp, at which tens of thousands of [...]
Oh, also Rove and Kenneth Lay of the Enron deregulatory debacle that put California hospitals in rolling blackouts in the dark.
vegas empty https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=Vegas+e...
They forced the US into trillions of dollars of debt by cutting taxes and starting wars.
They have not paid the bills for the wars that they started and debt-financed.
"Starve the beast" (Reagan/Bush, Bush, Trump): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
LIV Golf
"From Infiltrating Wikipedia to Paying Trump Millions in Golf Deals, Saudis Whitewash Rights Record" (2023) https://www.democracynow.org/2023/1/17/saudi_arabia_wikipedi... :
> LIV has paid millions to golf resorts owned by Donald Trump, who has publicly supported the new league which is attempting to compete with the PGA.
Trump takes direct payments from SA for Liv golf.
"Analysis: The real reason Donald Trump is on board with LIV Golf" https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/politics/donald-trump-liv-gol... quoting a presidential masto-toot:
> "All of those golfers that remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year,” Trump wrote. “If you don’t take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.”
The app seems to be doing what they say it can do. Is there any actual data as to it's effectiveness, match and false positive rate?
Where has the DHS made any statement that the app does something that it does not do?
The closest thing I can find is from the 2025 DHS AI use case inventory, where the entry for Mobile fortify states it's benefits are:
"Utilizing facial comparison or fingerprint matching services, agents/officers in the field are able to quickly verify identity utilizing trusted source photos."
The claim is not that the app verifies someone's identity, but that it can potentially find trusted source photos that look similar to the person in question.
The officer could then evaluate the match, and make a determination to their own satisfaction that their subject is one and the same as the person in the database.
[...] an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship [...]
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-palantir-ai-enterp...
CBP -> Customs and Border Protection, descended from U.S. Customs Service, which traces back to the end of the 18th century, but added to DHS at the beginning of the 21st
ICE -> Immigration and Customs Enforcement, created in 2003 from the criminal investigation arm of CBP and related agencies
They are related but not the same. Under the current US regime, all the stops are being pulled out and all the lines blurred. As a result, you're seeing ICE doing crowd control, BORTAC (basically CBP's tactical / SWAT unit) doing run-of-the-mill immigration enforcement, and all kinds of other wackiness. The DHS does much much more than just CBP/ICE stuff too.
> They are related but not the same. Under the current US regime, all the stops are being pulled out and all the lines blurred.
A large part of that is that notional function of the “immigration crackdown” falls logically in ICE's domain, and this was the justification for massively increasing ICE funding, but CBP (and particularly the Border Patrol) having much more of the no-rules culture that was sought for the operation, leading to CBP and Border Patrol personnel taking key roles in the operation (which is why, until he became something of a political scapegoat for the Administration policy, a Border Patrol area commander got redesignated a "commander at large" and then given operational command not just of Border Patrol involvement but the notionally ICE-led operation.)
A notable case was the Uvalde school massacre, which only ended when a border patrol tactical team (believe from the BORTAC group you mentioned) took over from dithering local forces. This was a major example, but interagency collaboration has also become routine in far less dire circumstances.
The militarization and blurred lines have thus become a feature not a bug. And it won't be reformed simply by having the current administration fade into the rearview mirror. It would be beneficial I think though if current excesses led to a more holistic introspection and reform, but we'll see.
The Patriot Act removed and lowered many of the barriers. And now we're back to what the Church Commission found.
Trust me the US does not have a patent on bureaucracy... Over the centuries things just develop. One can only assume it made sense once.
Why are nazis kidnapping Americans in broad daylight? Osama Bin Laden. The most successful terror attack in history.
If we assume that the purpose of the terror attack was the official one, it has not been successful for its initiators, but for those controlling USA.
If "successful" is intended to refer to the fact that 3 out of 4 airplanes have reached their target, I remember how I watched live the events and I was stupefied that the 2nd and the 3rd airplanes have hit their targets. For the 1st airplane, it was normal to be successful, as nobody expected that action. But for the following 2, I was familiar with air defenses from places that are supposed to be much less advanced than USA and there was plenty of time to find the airplanes and shoot them down. I could never understand why this did not happen and even more I could never understand why there has never been any credible US official explanation for why it did not happen (I mean the explanation that they could not find the airplanes because they have turned off their transponders is not credible).
He probably didn't anticipate how successful he'd be. he attacked WTC because it's a symbol of finance and economy; pentagon, military. he had targets like that. If you recall, it wasn't the US alone that invaded Afghanistan, it was NATO. Now, using the very same reactionary forces of his 9/11 attack, that very force that retaliated after 9/11 is being destroyed.
The attack has killed a great number of innocent American citizens, but while this was a tragedy for their families, friends and relatives, this provided an opportunity for the US government and Republican Party of obtaining greatly increased powers and greatly increased spending and they have secured reelection and the ability to initiate a couple of wars from which some well-connected companies gained a lot.
There is nothing that Bush Junior could have done to gain so much as he did, other than USA being the victim of such an attack. Assuming that the US government had nothing to do with the attack, it was nonetheless the luckiest event that could have ever happened to them. Bin Laden and his followers have gained absolutely nothing, except cheering like fools for a few days that they have hurt their supposed enemies.
A few days? That one day led America to prosecute two wars for over a decade - both of which failed. Both of which seeded the ground for the current moment, as the prevailing political establishment has lost all credibility.
This century was supposed to belong to America. Go back and see how optimistic people where about the new millennium. Where is that now? It's gone.
Because the American government responded to one of the darkest days in history by:
1. Invading Afghanistan only to lose it two decades later to the very people they had tried to dislodge in the most painful way possible - literally running away on the tarmac while those that had risked their lives to support them were begging not to be abandoned.
2. Invading Iraq when there were no WMDs and Saddam Hussein has never had anything to do with the faction that was in Afghanistan. Thousands died for what? And we are still there even though that war was supposed to end long ago.
Both of these entities had previously been supplied weapons by the United States btw, in Afghanistan against the Soviets and in Iraq against Iran. No one was held accountable for that. Oops.
Why do you think people are voting for the system to be torn apart? You are correct the attack itself would not destroy America, as everyone knew. The question is what would America do after.
On that count, the failures were numerous and again, no one in power was ever held accountable. This is its own form of lawlessness that has encouraged the present circumstances.
Now a security apparatus that has failed to impose its will on the streets of the likes of Baghdad is manifesting in a new form in Minneapolis. Afghanistan was known as the graveyard of empires. The goal was to draw us there so it could once again live up to its name. In such a circumstance, success is not measured in a manner of days, but in years. Thus I very sadly find much to agree with in the comment you so eagerly dismissed.
Once they chew through the undocumented people in America, I wonder where the DHS is going to find the other 80 or 90 million people to deport?
Also a majority of people still favor deportation of those who entered the IS illegally regardless of other criminal acts.
>a majority of people still favor deportation of those who entered the IS illegally regardless of other criminal acts.
I'm not so sure about this. I think it depends on whose polls you believe. Here's one from Fox News from July of 2025 (before the absolute SNAFU in Minneapolis) which claims:
>The latest Fox News survey, released Monday, finds 3 in 10 back deporting all illegal immigrants, while 6 in 10 supports only deporting those charged with crimes but would allow others to stay and apply for citizenship. One in 10 favors letting all illegal immigrants remain in the U.S.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-support-depor...
In any case, I'm not a fan of creating a quasi-slave class out of illegal immigration. I think there should be stiff penalties that actually start to get applied to employers. I think it's fine to have demand based immigration, most people that can pass a security check and have a place to go should be allowed in.
However, that should be offset by a few restrictions... first, no social welfare benefits from taxpayer funds, or orgs that receive taxpayer funding. Second, pay floors based on job class. H1B should get paid at least $50/hr and farm workers at least $20/hr imo. I also think there should be a 100% employer paid tax that is used to fund education grants for STEM and vocational programs in the US. The pay floors and tax on imported labor are expressly to secure the future of citizens and act as a ballast against excess immigration to the detriment of existing citizens and working resident aliens.
I also think that you should have 10 years to assimilate and apply for citizenship... this should include learning the English language or ASL/braille if you are deaf. Citizenship testing should be in English or ASL/braille without benefit of a translator. I also think we need to eliminate birthright citizenship, that I don't believe the implementors meant for it to be interpreted nearly as broadly as it is currently applied.
I consider my takes above to be pretty reasonable... that said, I do feel that anyone who entered illegally and especially those in the country for decades without assimilating by learning the language well enough to communicate or to even attempt at becoming a legal resident should be deported. Not just those who commit felonies. While I'm pretty libertarian in most of my views, I think borders and national identity are important and both have been diluted for generations. Even if the "rah rah 'merica!" position was mostly propaganda, I feel it was largely beneficial to the nation as a whole.
When the giant finally wakes in America it won't be reasonable or well targeted. I'm reminded that violence in gang neighborhoods is modeled as a contaigen. Have we ever seen a violence "pandemic"?
Which I guess is why Zuck has been building compounds.
I haven't seen AI feature in any reporting. Rather, the software had bugs, some people decided the software couldn't be wrong and convinced others to the point of conviction?