Rad Geek People's Daily

For more than a decade now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the violent federal law-enforcement agency that specializes in hunting down, rounding up, imprisoning and deporting undocumented immigrants, has compiled a trove of biometric data and dossiers, and a mass surveillance toolkit including facial recognition, fingerprint and DNA testing, automated license plate readers, closed-circuit TV cameras, GPS tracking units, cell-site simulators, private commercial databases, law-enforcement databases, wiretapping and Wi-Fi interception. They have routinely used this toolkit to engage in warrantless surveillance of vast numbers of both immigrants and American citizens, and they have quietly expanded it over the last several years to evade public accountability and to skirt controls introduced by cities and states … to protect communities from precisely these kind of intrusive searches.

Since its creation in 2003, ICE has consistently marketed itself as a law enforcement agency that targets criminal aliens, a term the agency has used to describe noncitizens who have had contact with law enforcement, regardless of whether they were actually convicted of an offense.^[36] ICE uses the language of the criminal legal system to defend deportation rhetorically, but it also relies heavily on criminal legal system infrastructure to carry out enforcement operations. Over the last two decades, the immigrant rights movement has done powerful work to reveal the ways that ICE uses police and jails to investigate people for deportation, including through the notorious mandatory fingerprint sharing scheme known as Secure Communities (S-Comm), which established a system by which fingerprint scans taken by state and local law enforcement are automatically compared against a database operated by DHS, alerting ICE to possible immigration violations.^[37]

What has received less attention, however, is ICE’s deployment of a much broader array of data-sharing and data collection programs that amass information from sources outside of law enforcement.^[38] As cities and states have enacted sanctuary policies limiting law enforcement cooperation with immigration officials, ICE has progressively expanded its surveillance toolkit to include troves of data beyond what can be provided by state and local police. ICE has turned toward government agencies like DMVs, asking for driver information and requesting face recognition searches on entire license photo databases. It has ramped up investments in contracts with private data brokers, buying access to billions of pieces of data sourced from places like credit agencies and utility companies.

— American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, Finding 1
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, 10 May 2022.

The result has been a vast, intrusive surveillance apparatus covering access to personally identifying information on the overwhelming majority of the American population, whether immigrant or native-born. Here’s the overview of the report.

This report, the product of a two-year investigation involving over 200 Freedom of Information requests, a review of over 100,000 ICE procurement transactions and a series of comprehensive legal surveys, fills many of those gaps. It explains the historical and legal context that has allowed ICE to create its dragnet and offers policymakers and advocates a frame through which to understand it. The report also illustrates the reach of ICE surveillance through case studies on ICE’s use of: (1) DMV data and photos; (2) utilities data; and (3) interview data from unaccompanied children detained at the border.

The results of our investigation paint a stark picture of dragnet surveillance, indicating that ICE has used face recognition technology to scan the driver’s license photographs of 1 in 3 adults, has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults, is able to track the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults and could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records. Secrecy, impunity, dragnet surveillance–19 years after Byrd stood in the well of the U.S. Senate and declaimed against the Homeland Security Act, his warning has come to pass.^[27]

This report is not the first to describe ICE’s surveillance dragnet. For years, organizations like CASA, the Immigrant Defense Project, Just Futures Law, the Legal Aid Justice Center, Make the Road, Mijente, the NILC, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), the ACLU, Project South and dozens of others have warned of, and advocated against, ICE surveillance. This report is the first, however, that attempts to quantify the reach of ICE surveillance into the daily transactions and private lives of every American, as Byrd predicted. Based on this new research and analysis, the report calls upon Congress to investigate and conduct oversight into ICE surveillance, and it offers policymakers and communities a set of concrete suggestions for taking apart this American dragnet.

— American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, Introduction
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, 10 May 2022.

This systematic, ever-growing surveillance apparatus began at least as early as 2008. ICE has continued to grow its secret surveillance programs and capacity for warrantless spying throughout the administrations of Republican and Democratic presidents, under every president from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

In 2008, ICE expanded its cooptation of policing infrastructure to include digital infrastructure with the launch of the Secure Communities program. The keystone of S-Comm is a fingerprint-sharing initiative that automatically sends the fingerprints of any person who is booked by federal, state or local law enforcement to the FBI and ICE.^[45] While several states initially resisted enrolling in S-Comm, the Obama administration stated that participation was mandatory.^[46] As a result, all 3,181 law enforcement jurisdictions in the country–in all 50 states, the district and five U.S. territories–were enrolled in the program.^[47] In 2014, after years of intense pressure from the immigrant rights movement, President Obama and DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson suspended S-Comm but replaced it with the substantially similar Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), leaving the biometric information sharing processes across the country unchanged.^[48] That enabled President Trump to issue an executive order immediately restarting S-Comm five days after his inauguration.^[49] Although President Joe Biden revoked that order in early 2021,^[50] the fingerprint-sharing program still remains in place today.

These data-sharing programs and cooperative agreements with law enforcement agencies became cornerstones of U.S. immigration enforcement. Just three years after the launch of S-Comm, the number of people deported under the program made up 20% of total deportations that year.^[51] As of 2020, about 70% of ICE arrests resulted from ICE officers being notified of a person’s impending release from jail or prison.^[52] The increasing levels of cooperation between immigration officials and law enforcement also coincided with an explosion in the number of deportations from the U.S.

. . .

While ICE’s initiatives to draw information from state and local police were rolled out with great publicity, its efforts to reach data streams from sources outside of law enforcement have been extremely secretive. ICE began broadening the scope of its data collection in response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as part of an overarching federal initiative to radically increase domestic surveillance under the auspices of the war on terror. Before 9/11, immigration authorities rarely investigated cases outside of the criminal context.

. . . [During a massive expansion of domestic surveillance and personnel intended to track down visa overstays and people with outstanding removal orders] ICE began systematically securing new troves of data that it could use to pull people into detention and deportation. Unlike the data fueling prior initiatives, this new data came overwhelmingly from sources outside of law enforcement, including agencies and offices within federal, state and local governments, as well as from the private sector. As ICE sought to remedy the data shortages that hindered previous efforts to pursue cases, it amassed records far beyond what was provided by state and local police, allowing the agency to track a significantly larger number of people. With these efforts, the reach of ICE surveillance far exceeded that of the already massive databases maintained on arrestees and visa holders, usurping data sets that easily included the majority of people in the U.S.

— American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, Finding 1
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, 10 May 2022.

Over and over again, in states where reform-minded governors and state leiglsatures have made deliberate efforts to cut off cooperation with ICE data-gathering and enforcement, the agency has used alternative pipelines, private data brokers, and secretive side doors to circumvent even the most determined attempts to limit their surveillance.

The revelation that ICE could access Washington’s driver database sent shockwaves statewide. Inslee issued a personal apology, admitting that the state fell short in fulfilling its commitment to protecting immigrants.^[108] He also moved quickly to prevent something like that from happening again. Inslee immediately ordered Department of Licensing employees to stop sharing driver information with ICE absent a court order and ordered the department to conduct a full-scale internal review of its data-sharing practices.^[109] . . . By the time the results of the investigation went public, the Department of Licensing had decided to cut off ICE’s access to the DAPS database.^[115] The department no longer permitted face recognition searches on driver’s license photographs for immigration enforcement purposes. Washington was assuring drivers that it had locked the door to the state’s driver’s license information. . . .

Yet Inslee’s attempts to sever ICE’s access to driver’s license records appear to have only encouraged the agency to turn toward a secretive side door. . . . The Department of Licensing wasn’t the only agency in the state that could grant access to drivers’ records and license photos; the Washington State Police operated an electronic data-sharing system known as WSP ACCESS, and according to the employee, agents could use it to electronically query and receive the license photos of Washington drivers.^[117] . . . ICE has also prolifically used WSP ACCESS to access Washingtonians’ driver data, sometimes with state employees’ encouragement. . . .

. . . Alarmingly, despite the governor’s best efforts, there is every indication that ICE still has unrestricted, warrantless access to Washington drivers’ data. How is that possible? The answer lies in the multiplicity of intersecting access points through which states like Washington allow driver information to flow to outside agencies and the difficulty of severing those points of access. Despite the efforts states have taken to restrict ICE’s access to driver’s license data, ICE routinely finds ways to circumvent most state-imposed limits. When one spigot turns off, ICE simply moves to another pipeline.

. . . ICE investigators use a sprawling web of databases, networks and information-sharing initiatives to access states’ driver records. . . . This set of communications reference the three major pipelines that ICE uses to obtain state driver’s license information. First, ICE accesses driver’s information by making direct requests to DMVs. ICE agents may contact DMV employees to ask for records and may also request employees to conduct face recognition searches. Second, ICE accesses drivers’ information via government databases. ICE agents may directly search electronic databases of registered drivers and vehicles. Finally, ICE accesses drivers’ information through data brokers. DMVs frequently sell driver’s license data to private companies that resell access to ICE agents and others.

— American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, Finding 2
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, 10 May 2022.

Here’s what all this meant in the lives of José Santos Quintero Hernandez, Maribel Cortez and their family.

José Santos Quintero Hernandez and Maribel Cortez have been married for 22 years. They met in the U.S. after emigrating separately from El Salvador, fleeing violence and what Hernandez described as certain death.^[16] The couple had led a quiet life, raising five children in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb less than one-hour’s drive from the U.S. Capitol.^[17]

One morning in early February 2020, a little over 17 years after Byrd’s remarks [about the dangers of organizing the new Department of Homeland Security —RG], the Hernandez family got a knock at their door. One of the children opened it. The kids watched as ICE agents entered the house, arrested their father and took him away.

There are millions of undocumented people in the U.S. How did ICE come to arrest Hernandez? Had he just arrived and missed a court date? No, he had been living here for decades. Had he come to ICE’s attention through local law enforcement? No, neither Hernandez nor Cortez had ever had any encounters with the police or immigration enforcement.

No, the agents explained to Hernandez as they walked him to their car. They found him because he had recently obtained a Maryland driver’s license. They used the information he gave to the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration to find him, arrest him, lock him up in an immigration detention center and start deportation proceedings against him.^[18]

Later that month, The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun revealed that, in addition to searching through Maryland drivers’ personal information -– their names, addresses and dates of birth -– ICE had also been scanning Maryland drivers’ faces and conducting face recognition searches on their license photos. Those warrantless searches were not restricted to undocumented immigrants or other applicants for what are called “standard” licenses; ICE had been logging into a state face recognition database and scanning the faces of the state’s drivers, which totaled more than 4 million people.^[19]

— American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, Introduction
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, 10 May 2022.

Here is the part where Maryland lawmakers were shocked and heart-broken that the direct, unintended consequence of their supposedly pro-immigrant reforms was actually to provide ICE with more information and resources to hunt down the undocumented immigrants they were sending to the DMV.

Maryland lawmakers were shocked–particularly those who had led the effort in 2013 to allow undocumented residents to apply for licenses. Delegate Joseline Peña-Melnyk of Prince George’s County was distraught to learn ICE was tracking down Maryland immigrants using a program she had supported. It breaks your heart, she told The Washington Post. We didn’t know. We could have gotten it right in the beginning if we knew.^[20] To this day, state officials seem to have no idea how many times ICE has scanned the faces of Maryland drivers.^[21]

— American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, Introduction
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, 10 May 2022.

And to be sure it is awful to see, but liberal lawmakers never seem to see that the only way to get it right when it comes to government surveillance is to stop surveilling people, collect less data, and resist any and every attempt by law enforcement to get access to whatever you do have on file. You don’t have to secure the data that you never collect. If you go around gathering tons of information about undocumented immigrants and actively encourage them to turn over lots of information about who they are and where they live, then the border police will do everything they can to get their hands on that information. Of course they will. There is a lot of heartbreak here, but there should be very little surprise. The big villain of the piece is ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the United States federal government, including all of the administrations, both Conservative and Progressive, that have created their architecture of mass surveillance and mass deportation. But the liberal reform community and their favorite politicians — however kindhearted their intentions — have also spent a decade and a half mostly encouraging supposedly friendly state, local and federal agencies to gather lots and lots of personally identifying information on undocumented immigrants, in the name of bringing them out of the shadows, facilitating their entry into the aboveground formal economy, and connecting them with adminsitrative half-measures, precarious protected statuses, and political deferrals as a partial substitute for real legal residency. This is sold as practical reform, but its unintended practical consequence has been to feed the growth of ICE’s dossiers and surveillance network, and to leave millions of people completely at the mercy of the slender legal and political restraints on the demands of federal law enforcement and national security agencies.^[1]

The massive scale of ICE’s surveillance programs have turned the agency into a key component in what Anil Kalhan, professor at Drexel Kline School of Law, has called the immigration surveillance state.^[96] According to Kalhan, ICE surveillance has transformed a regime of immigration control, operating primarily on noncitizens at the border, into part of a more expansive regime of migration and mobility surveillance, operating without geographic bounds upon citizens and noncitizens alike.^[97] University of California Irvine professor Ana Muñiz recognized a similar shift within a specific immigration enforcement system, the Enforcement Integrated Database. She argues that increased data collection and data-sharing arrangements transformed the database from a case management system to a mass surveillance system.^[98]

— American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, Finding 1
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, 10 May 2022.

These expansive surveillance programs, conducted furtively over decades by a secretive federal law-enforcement agency with the tacit or explicit support of multiple Presidents of the United States, largely evading scrutiny or review by legislative authorities and repeatedly circumventing attempts to limit their scope by other agencies at the state or federal level, are intrusive, invasive, and unaccountable; they are also frightening, politically corrosive, ethically bankrupt, and profoundly damaging in concrete terms for the lives and livelihoods of real people. It is an outrageous and invasive effort to carry out the senseless demands of an utterly unjustifiable, morally outrageous policy of border control.

The mass surveillance apparatus is awful. It has grown out of control because there is no such thing as immigration enforcement without a police state, and the nature of every police state is to grow out of control as long and as far as it can. There is no such thing as a limited police state, just a police state that will inspect and follow everyone it can for as long as it is permitted to do so.

It should not be accepted placidly, and there is precious little excuse at this point for believing that it can be curtailed, controlled or rendered harmless by piecemeal progressive reforms. That there machine feeds and grows on the paper trail that is generated by piecemeal progressive reforms. The basic incentive of every form of government enforcement, and every form of government surveillance, is to feed, and grow, on everything it can find, as much it can, and as far as it can go. It may be limited more or less by practical real-world constraints, by the incentives of competing powers, or by really determined and effective popular protest. But ultimately it can be stopped only by confronting and getting rid of the root cause.

It is practically nearly impossible to seriously limit or get rid of the immigration surveillance state without seriously limiting or getting rid of immigration controls and immigration enforcement. ICE spies because ICE investigates, and ICE investigates because ICE deports people. The only real way to cut off the spying is to cut off the deporting.^[2] And that is absolutely something worth doing on its own merits, because the effects of those controls on the immigrants targeted by them are awful and completely unjustifiable.

Open all borders, dismantle all gates, and let people come and go as they please. You don’t need mass surveillance if you’re not trying to track people down. You don’t need to track people down when they haven’t done anything wrong.

Abolish ICE, immediately, completely and forever.

Via.

• Jesse Walker, ICE’s surveillance apparatus has been used to skirt controls…, Twitter dot com, 10 May 2022.
• Ed Pilkington, US immigration agency operates vast surveillance dragnet, study finds, The Guardian, 10 May 2022.
• C.J. Ciaramella, ICE Operates a Sweeping Dragnet Surveillance System, New Report Finds, Reason, 11 May 2022.
• Corin Faife, ICE uses data brokers to bypass surveillance restrictions, report finds, The Verge, 10 May 2022.

See also.

• GT 2021-04-30: iCOP
• GT 2008-01-23: How can we safeguard our data? — Stop collecting it. You don’t have to secure data that you don’t collect.

1. ^[36]For example, the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) sends ICE officers into jails to interview detained people to determine if they may be deportable. CAP officers do not distinguish between people detained pre-trial and people who have been convicted of an offense. In fact, a significant number of people removed under CAP did not have criminal convictions. See Guillermo Cantor, Mark Noferi & Daniel E. Martinez, Enforcement Overdrive: A Comprehensive Assessment of ICE’s Criminal Alien Program, American Immigration Council 2 (Nov. 1, 2015), https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/enforcement_overdrive_a_comprehensive_assessment_of_ices_criminal_alien_program_final.pdf (PDF) (Out of more than half a million CAP removals that took place between FY 2010 and FY 2013, ICE classified the largest share (27.4 percent) as not definite criminals–i.e., ICE recorded no criminal conviction.).↩
2. ^[37]U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens 1-2 (2009), https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/secure_communities/securecommunitiesstrategicplan09.pdf (PDF) (Through the deployment and use of the biometric-based identification systems, all persons booked into custody will be automatically checked for their immigration status as well as prior criminal history.)↩
3. ^[38]This report distinguishes between law enforcement, and non-law enforcement data, but because of the increasing interoperability of databases and networks across all levels and branches of government, as a practical matter it may make more sense to begin thinking of all data as potentially law enforcement data.↩
4. ^[27]As a young man, Robert Byrd organized a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. As a young senator, he made his name opposing civil rights laws. As an older Senator, however, he was deeply embarrassed by this and became a staunch proponent of the Voting Rights Act and other key civil rights laws. This grace, unfortunately, never extended to people like Mr. Hernandez. In fact, Senator Byrd spoke heatedly against efforts to give undocumented people a path to citizenship. In remarks on the floor of the Senate during an immigration debate, he warned that any one of the undocumented, unchecked aliens… could be a potential terrorist. Regardless of his history or his motives, however, Senator Byrd’s warning has proved frighteningly accurate. 109 Cong. Rec. S2794 (daily ed. Apr. 4, 2006) (statement of Sen. Robert Byrd).↩
5. ^[45]U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens 1-2 (2009), https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/secure_communities/securecommunitiesstrategicplan09.pdf (PDF) (Through the deployment and use of the biometric-based identification systems, all persons booked into custody will be automatically checked for their immigration status as well as prior criminal history.). ↩
6. ^[46]Julia Preston, States Resisting Program Central to Obama’s Immigration Strategy, New York Times (May 5, 2011), https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/us/06immigration.html (The states’ objections are setting up a confrontation with the Department of Homeland Security, whose secretary, Janet Napolitano, has said that Secure Communities is mandatory and will be extended to all jurisdictions in the country by 2013.).↩
7. ^[47]U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secure Communities (Feb. 9, 2021), https://www.ice.gov/secure-communities (ICE completed full implementation of Secure Communities to all 3,181 jurisdictions within 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. Territories on January 22, 2013.).↩
8. ^[48]See Letter from Jeh Charles Johnson, Secretary, U.S. Department of Homeland Security to Thomas S. Winkowski, Acting Director, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement et al. 2–3 (Nov. 20, 2014), https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_memo_secure_communities.pdf (PDF) (Accordingly, I am directing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to discontinue Secure Communities. ICE should put in its place a program that will continue to rely on fingerprint-based biometric data submitted during bookings by state and local law enforcement agencies to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for criminal background checks. … This new program should be referred to as the Priority Enforcement Program or PEP.).↩
9. ^[49]Exec. Order No. 13,768, 82 Fed. Reg. 8799 (Jan. 25, 2017).↩
10. ^[50]Exec. Order No. 13,993, 86 Fed. Reg. 7051 (Jan. 25, 2021).↩
11. ^[51]In fiscal year 2011, the number of removals under S-Comm was 79,726. TRAC, Removals under the Secure Communities Program (2019), https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/secure/. In total, ICE ERO removed 396,906 individuals during fiscal year 2011. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, FY 2011: ICE announces year-end removal numbers, highlights focus on key priorities (Oct. 17, 2011), <https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/fy-2011-ice-announces-year-end-removal-numbers-highlights-focus-key-priorities#:~:text=Overall%2C%20in%20FY%202011%20ICE’s,of%20criminals%20since%20FY%202008>.↩
12. ^[52]Hillel R. Smith, Cong. Rsch. Serv., LSB10375, Immigration Detainers: Background and Recent Legal Developments 1 (2020).↩
13. ^[108]Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Inslee statement on Licensing policy changes to protect personal information of immigrants and refugees (Jan. 15, 2018), https://www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/inslee-statement-licensing-policy-changes-protect-personal-information-immigrants-and.↩
14. ^[109]Washington State Department of Licensing, DOL takes immediate steps to stop disclosure of information to federal immigration authorities, Washington State Department of Licensing: DOL Blog (Jan. 15, 2018), https://licensingexpress.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/dol-takes-immediate-steps-to-stop-disclosure-of-information-to-federal-immigration-authorities.↩
15. ^[115]Washington State Department of Licensing, DAPS Contract Terminations, 2017/2018, WADMV_002563 (US Dept. of Homeland Security, Immigration & Customs Enforcement / ERO Fugitive Ops Unit … TERMINATED — NO OPTION to sign a new contract … US Dept. of Homeland Security, Immigration & Customs Enforcement/DRO Yakima … TERMINATED — NO OPTION to sign a new contract … US Dept. of Homeland Security, Immigration & Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations … TERMINATED — WITH OPTION to sign a new contract).↩
16. ^[117]Washington State Department of Licensing, Email from Jeff Oehlerich, Investigator 3 to Border Patrol Agent (Mar. 30, 2017), WADMV001963-WADMV001964 (In the past, we have been very liberal in accepting the justification of criminal investigation from requestor’s [sic] and not required more specific descriptions. This changed about a month ago as the result of an executive order from the governor. We now require the title or statutory citation of the actual crime being investigated before we will provide a photo. This is at the direction of our executive leadership team. The wording that authorizes a photo for verifying identity when an officer may request identification, was added to allow officers to have direct access to photos in their patrol cars and sue them when they stop a violator who does not have ID. The WSP ACCESS system does have a specific query format where they can get a photo when they request a driver’s check. The actual method of making the query depends on the interface program the agency uses, so I don’t know what limitations or requirements each department may have. I would suggest contacting one of the agencies in your local area to see if thaye [sic] can assist.).↩
17. ^[16]Personal Information, State and Local Agencies, Restrictions on Access: Hearing on H.B. 23 Before the Md. H. of Delegates Judiciary Committee (Jan. 27, 2021) (statement of Alex Vazquez of CASA), https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Committees/Media/false?cmte=jud&ys=2021RS&clip=JUD_1_27_2021_meeting_2 (at 46:33, certain death).↩
18. ^[17]Erin Cox, Gov. Hogan opposed to ending ICE’s warrantless access to driver’s license database, Washington Post (Feb. 27, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/hogan-opposes-blocking-ice-from-drivers-licenses/2020/02/27/3e23bbcc-5903-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.html.↩
19. ^[18]See id.↩
20. ^[19]See Drew Harwell, ICE has run facial recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers, Washington Post (Feb. 26, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/26/ice-has-run-facial-recognition-searches-millions-maryland-drivers; Kevin Rector, ICE has access to Maryland driver’s license records. State lawmakers want to limit it, Baltimore Sun (Feb. 26, 2020), https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md-pol-ice-mva-bill-20200227-rsgqqajmwne4hollsz4svgpa6m-story.html. The term standard license is used in Maryland to differentiate these identity documents from licenses that comply with the requirements of the federal REAL ID Act, which requires verification of immigration status. Maryland’s face recognition repository, the Maryland Image Recognition System, or MIRS, includes all driver photos regardless of the kind of license. Bureau of Transp. Stat., U.S. Dep’t of Transp., Maryland: Transportation by the Numbers 2 (2020), https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/states2020/Maryland.pdf (PDF) (4.4 million licensed drivers in 2018).↩
21. ^[20]See Cox, supra note 17.↩
22. ^[21]See Letter from Kevin Combs, Md. Dep’t of Public Safety and Corr. Servs. to Sen. Susan C. Lee et al., Nov. 21, 2019 (explaining, in response to a query from legislators regarding the number of such searches, that Maryland does not have access to users’ search results and instead offering the number of sessions [that] were saved by ICE users in 2018 and 2019).↩
23. ^[1][There are some things that it is within the power of state and local authorities to do, and other things that it is not in their power to do. The best thing would be to open the borders, halt all deportations, release all detainees, and abolish ICE and CBP immediately, completely and forever. This is not something that it’s within the power of the Maryland state legislature to accomplish, even if they were willing to do so. But there are other things that are within their power, and within that limited scope, it would have been practically far better for them to put limits on local law enforcement’s opportunities or ability to demand papers, to reduce immigrants’ exposure to policing, and just to reduce or eliminate government requirements for photo ID wherever it is possible to do so — better, that is, than spending a decade and a half encouraging more undocumented residents to apply for photo IDs. You don’t have to secure data that you never collect. — But without photo IDs, how would they drive without fear of arrest? Do state governments need to have laws for arrest people who are driving around without a state-issued photo ID, not to mention proof of insurance and a whole bunch of extra paperwork? Do they, really? –RG]↩
24. ^[96]Anil Kalhan, Immigration Surveillance, 74 Md. L. Rev. 27 (2014).↩
25. ^[97]Id. at 2.↩
26. ^[98]Ana Muñiz, Secondary ensnarement: Surveillance systems in the service of punitive immigration enforcement, Punishment & Soc’y 2 (Feb. 11, 2020).↩
27. ^[2][One way to do this, if possible, would be to get the government to abandon the failed and abusive border-control policies that authorize the agency to go around deporting people. That’s real nice if you can get it. If you can’t, then there are other ways, besides direct policy change — if you can’t control those who set the policy, then you’d better set about using countervailing social and political pressures to systematically degrade the agency’s practical ability to pursue it. –R.G.]↩

The Museum of Stones

These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir–
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, horneblende,
agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, blueschist, gneiss and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary of stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immoveable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

— Carolyn Forché, The Museum of Stones (2007)

Meanwhile in the United States of America in 2022, the U.S. government has released Mohammed al-Qahtani from Guantanamo Bay after imprisoning him without trial for 20 years. They released him because he is suffering from debilitating schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. A U.S. Navy doctor now believes he has been tortured so severely and for so long that he is now too mentally impaired to function outside of a psychiatric institution or ever stand trial.

It is now the March of 2022. George W. Bush’s administration did this to human beings for seven years. Barack Obama said he would end it when he was first running for President — and then he got elected and his administration kept on doing the same thing for eight more years. Donald Trump’s administration kept on doing the same thing for four more years. Joe Biden’s administration has kept on doing the same thing for the last year and shows no sign of stopping. Mohammed al-Qahtani has finally been released into psychiatric care after 20 years of indefinite detention and torture without due process. There are still 38 prisoners who the U.S. military is holding indefinitely, forever, unless and until somebody in the U.S. military and government change their minds, in the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The United States government continues to do this, and they call it the Law of War.

If someone is trying to exploit their control over local Internet access to prevent you from accessing the news from the BBC, here is how to use Psiphon or Tor Browser or other circumvention and dark web access tools to route around the damage and get uncensored access. Screen shot and text below:

Advice on accessing BBC News

Published: 4 March 2022
Updated: 4 March 2022

To access the BBC, circumvention tools can be used, such as the Psiphon app (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac).

The Tor Browser also has a dedicated BBC site, on this URL: https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion/

Please note the BBC site for Tor works only on the Tor Browser or a similar browser, such as the Onion Browser (for iPhones).

If you find it difficult to get the two applications above from AppStore or Google Play Store, please send a blank email to get@psiphon3.com or gettor@torproject.org, respectively. You will then be sent an email with a direct and safe download link.

Как получить доступ к новостям Би-би-си

Для доступа к Би-би-си можно использовать инструменты обхода цензуры, такие как приложение Psiphon (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac).

Браузер Tor также имеет специальный сайт Би-би-си по этому URL-адресу: https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion/russian

Обратите внимание, что сайт Би-би-си для Tor работает только в браузере Tor или аналогичном браузере, таком как Onion Browser (для iPhone).

Если вам трудно получить эти два приложения из AppStore или Google Play Store, отправьте пустое электронное письмо по адресу get@psiphon3.com или gettor@torproject.org соответственно. Вам будет отправлено электронное письмо с прямой и безопасной ссылкой для скачивания.

Порада, як отримувати новини ВВС

Щоб отримати доступ до BBC, можна використовувати інструменти обходу, такі як додаток Psiphon (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac).

Браузер Tor також має спеціальний сайт BBC за цією URL-адресою: https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion/ukrainian

Зверніть увагу, що сайт BBC для Tor працює лише у браузері Tor або подібному браузері, наприклад у браузері Onion (на iPhone).

Якщо вам складно завантажити дві вищезазначені програми з AppStore або Google Play Store, надішліть порожній лист на адресу get@psiphon3.com або gettor@torproject.org відповідно. Потім вам буде надіслано електронний лист із прямим і безпечним посиланням для завантаження.

— BBC, Advice on Accessing BBC News. Accessed 12 March 2022.

The Russian army is besieging Mariupol and attacking crowded civilian targets like mosques and hospitals. Inside Russia, Russian anti-war protesters are in the streets; the state is arresting thousands of people daily and pursuing a ruthless campaign of censorship on dissident information sources and dismantling the last remaining fragments of a free press freedom of the press, using — natch — laws for controlling misinformation or fakes in news and social media. The U.S. government unconscionably continues to shilly-shally and delay issuing visas for Ukrainian refugees trying to flee the war and come to the United States.

Many people in the West are righteously outraged about all this. As well they should be. Many people have taken that outrage and fed it into an utterly histrionic campaign of moral panic, inappropriately directed against Russian people, Russian culture, Russian things and even Russian animals according to the most ridiculous and flatly despicable dictates of War Logic. War Logic curdles every humanitarian impulse into a theatrically stupid and racist campaign for the collective humiliation and punishment of supposed enemies who in fact have nothing to do with the war or the government that oppresses them, or the nation that they are somehow or another vaguely associated with.

For example, here is a Democratic Congressman claiming to represent the State of California:

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said on CNN Thursday that kicking Russian students out of U.S. universities should be “on the table” in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin launching an invasion into Ukraine.

Frankly, I think closing their embassy in the United States, kicking every Russian student out of the United States … should … be on the table. … Vladimir Putin needs to know every day that he is in Ukraine, there are more severe options that could come, Swalwell said on CNN Newsroom.

— Hannah Grossman, Eric Swalwell floats kicking Russians out of US universities in retaliation to Putin invading Ukraine
Fox News, 24 February 2022

These options aren’t severe for Vladimir Vladimirovich. They’re severe for innocent Russian college students who have nothing to do with this terrible war, simply because they are Russian nationals. This is a despicable proposal for collective punishment as well as a wildly counterproductive effort to further isolate Russian people from cultural contact and exchange with the West. Swalwell ought to be ashamed of himself, and censured by his colleagues.

Here is a cowardly decision by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to cave in to demands that they shut down performances by a 20 year old piano prodigy who vocally opposes the war on Ukraine for no reason other than the fact that he ought to be punished for being a Russian national:

A young Russian pianist who was set to perform with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra this week has been struck from the schedule after protest.^[-24]

However, the orchestra maintained its praise for 20-year-old Alexander Malofeev, who has been outspoken against the invasion of Ukraine, where he said he has some family members.

The OSM feels that it would be inappropriate to receive Mr. Malofeev this week, wrote a spokesperson for the orchestra, Pascale Ouimet, in a statement.

We continue, however, to believe in the importance of maintaining relationships with artists of all nationalities who embrace messages of peace and hope. We look forward to welcoming this exceptional artist when the context allows it.^[-23]

. . . The orchestra at first declined [to cancel Malofeev’s performances], saying Malofeev had spoken openly against the invasion. But it ultimately decided it was the right call considering the serious impact on the civilian population of Ukraine caused by the Russian invasion, Ouimet wrote.

— Selena Ross, Montreal Symphony Orchestra drops Russian piano prodigy from concerts amid backlash
CTV News, 8 March 2022.

No word yet on how many civilian lives have been saved by halting a Russian adolescent’s piano performances in Montreal. Nevertheless:

The orchestra’s statement on Tuesday said it wanted to reaffirm its solidarity with the Ukrainian people and is making a donation in support of them, and also urges the public to do the same.

But OSM musicians and their conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, stressed that they still have an excellent collaboration with Malofeev, according to the statement.

I was very pleased to be working in Montreal for the first time with the extraordinary young pianist Alexander Malofeev, Thomas said.

It is regrettable that political situations have made it impossible.^[-22] I look forward to the possibility of collaborating with him in the near future.

In two Facebook posts, Malofeev has decried the war, first writing on March 2 that the truth is that every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict.

On Monday, however,^[-21] he added that he’s upset by the hatred going in all directions, in Russia and around the world, and that he still believe[s] Russian culture and music specifically should not be tarnished by the ongoing tragedy, though it is impossible to stay aside now.

— Selena Ross, Montreal Symphony Orchestra drops Russian piano prodigy from concerts amid backlash
CTV News, 8 March 2022.

It is of course a self-serving lie to lament how impossible it is to let a Russian pianist play the piano in Montreal. There would be nothing simpler; they were already planning to do it, and they are putting on the concerts anyway with the rest of the (non-Russian) performers. The OSM made a decision to discriminate against a Russian piano performer for no other reason than the fact that he is a Russian national.

Here is the International Cat Federation (FIFe) taking a stand against cats bred in Russia:

The FIFe Executive Board is shocked and horrified that the army of the Russian Federation invaded the Republic of Ukraine and started a war. Many innocent people died, many more are wounded and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are forced to flee their homes to save their lives. We can all witness the destruction and chaos caused by this unprecedented act of aggression.

On top of that our Ukrainian fellow feline fanciers are desperately trying to take care of their cats and other animals in these trying circumstances. . . . The Board of FIFe feels it cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing,^[-20] so it decided that as of 01.03.2022:

• No cat bred in Russia may be imported and registered in any FIFe pedigree book outside Russia, regardless of, which organization issued its pedigree.
• No cat belonging to exhibitors living in Russia may be entered at any FIFe show outside Russia, regardless of, which organization these exhibitors hold their membership in.

These restrictions are valid until 31.05.2022 and will be reviewed as and when necessary.

— International Cat Federation / Fédération Internationale Féline, Statement regarding the situation in Ukraine
FIFe News Page, accessed 12 March 2022.
Quoted in Vanity Fair (3 March 2022) and the Washington Post (3 March 2022)

I would say, You are issuing international sanctions against cats for being bred in Russia. But these are people who would issue sanctions against cats for being bred in Russia. Then issue a statement that they could do no other, because in the face of the Russian army’s atrocities they cannot stand by and do nothing.

This is not a sane or intelligent response to the atrocities committed by Russia’s military and government. People look back on ridiculous exercises like Freedom Fries and Liberty Cabbage and persecuting Dachshunds as a sort of condensate of black farce from the passions of war; sometimes they wonder that people could seriously do ridiculous shit like that. Of course they could. We are exactly the same people as the people who did this before. The spirit of war is the marshalling of passionate outrage into collective hatreds; War Logic makes ignoramuses and contemptible bullies of us all. It makes everything worse, mutilates the analytical mind and deforms the passions into the patrolling of imaginary opposing camps; if it has any significant effect at all it is always to ratchet up conflict, punish the innocent and make global culture and politics more brutal and dangerous. Don’t do that. You don’t have to. You’ll look like like a demented fanatic and a preposterous, illiberal tool after even a moment to reflect.

1. ^[-24][By Ukrainian-Canadian protesters who are demanding a boycott of Russian cultural products. –R.G.]↩
2. ^[-23][Sic. –R.G.]↩
3. ^[-22][Sic. –R.G.]↩
4. ^[-21][Sic. –R.G.]↩
5. ^[-20][Somebody wrote this and published it on the World Wide Web. –R.G.]↩