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ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
21–30 of 146 posts
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#22Given how many accounts online are bots or anonymous, will they ever be able to shake out which real people which personas belong to? Or will it be a case of "we said this is you, so that makes it you"?
Yes, they’ll use bots to detect the bots. I guarantee it’s not hard to detect outliers (bots) via many different heuristics at this point. It’s going to turn into a perpetual game of whack a mole just like SEO and ad blocking.
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#23It’s pretty clear that ICE is the seed of a paramilitary force.
Given their recent actions in Chicago and elsewhere, it's clear they already are a paramilitary force.
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#24It’s pretty clear that ICE is the seed of a paramilitary force.
A force with significant capability to surveil US citizens. > Together, these teams would operate as intelligence arms of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. They will receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests. [...] The scope of information contractors are expected to collect is broad. Draft i…
Which capability has been iteratively built out for decades across multiple administrations against the consistent professional recommendation and public outcry of engineers, civil rights advocates, and some citizenry, and has at last landed in the malicious hands we've been warning about.
Nothing here is either surprising or unpredicted. It's just ugly because it's finally happening.
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#25Given how many accounts online are bots or anonymous, will they ever be able to shake out which real people which personas belong to? Or will it be a case of "we said this is you, so that makes it you"?
There are already attribution technologies that are reliable and definitive. There's no real technical reason that they wouldn't have the capability to directly attribute accounts.
Now..
is any of that gonna stop John or Joan Q Public who has a running disagreement with their asian or hispanic neighbor from calling in a "tip"? Probably not.
Will that tip result in an automated digital proctology exam that may land them, or people they may have been communicating with (like grandma), in ICE custody?
I'm thinking probably so.
The danger here is not really technology. The danger here is people. They are essentially automating the "snitch-to-detainment" pipeline.
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#26[flagged]
You don't even need to take a job. You can just [dress up as ICE](https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/us/ice-impersonators-on-the-r...) and use the threat of deportation to assault them.
Or you could probably take the job and do that while getting paid. It's clear enough this admin would approve.
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#27What happened to all those 2nd Amendment conservatives who needed their guns to protect us from the governments jack booted thugs?
We ask things like this because we fundamentally misunderstand the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement's fundamental claim is that America is under attack by an insurgent force. The Trump regime (read: Heritage Foundation) is a counter-insurgency operating under emergency conditions.
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#28What happened to all those 2nd Amendment conservatives who needed their guns to protect us from the governments jack booted thugs?
They are the jack-booted thugs, and they always have been.
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#29Yet another reason to dump Twitter, Meta, Tiktok and other social sites. People can always go mack to USENET and IRC if they want to make it hard to be tracked :)
Matrix, session, simplex seems like a interesting idea too.
Not sure if signal allows anonymous-ish personas for their groups but simplex definitely does but out of all the options given, maybe irc is the most well known :)
So irc it is lol
Re: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
A force with significant capability to surveil US citizens. > Together, these teams would operate as intelligence arms of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. They will receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests. [...] The scope of information contractors are expected to collect is broad. Draft i…
Which capability has been iteratively built out for decades across multiple administrations against the consistent professional recommendation and public outcry of engineers, civil rights advocates, and some citizenry, and has at last landed in the malicious hands we've been warning about. Nothing here is either surprising or unpredicted. It's just ugly because it's finally happening.
If it makes you feel any better, I can assure you we've been using these technologies all along. Only we used it for people we claimed were "street criminals" and "gang members". It's just that now we're rolling it out to have society-wide control instead of just using it for what we were told was simply "pacifying inner-cities".
If I were a man given to being suspicious, I'd swear that the whole time using these technologies for "street criminals" and "gang members" was never about "pacifying inner-cities" at all. I'd be inclined to think that maybe it was just the equivalent of the beta test.
But I'm not given to being suspicious. So I know that whole way of thinking is just nutty. right?