My takeaways from the article.

1. ICE\DHS wants to blend in with all sorts of law enforcement to not being singled out and hated that easily - their facilities and actions face protests, even some backlash from politicians, that makes them feel a bit vulnerable;
2. They aren't hitting numbers their managers want, in employment too, so they want cops to both snitch for them and filling their datasets;
3. and also being put into pipeline ending with an ICE contract after exposure to their toys;
4. And, about these toys, further hammering down the AI as a useful get-out-of-jail card because it can consult you to either let go or murder a person. Technically, not murder them by now, just call ICE on them. But I can see how someone from "the bad apples" would like that another shield from liability over shooting someone in cold blood. The whole notion that AI can decide something for you with no repercussions is bigger than the ICE problem, it affects every sphere of life on some fundamental level, and it directly benefits the worst people you can imagine.

There is a layer of copium paste spread thin over this, like they feel weak if they need to upgrade cops to the latest fascism kernel asap. But, like, the whole idea that there are guys on the streets worse than cops is a big wake up sign.

We're post american at this point. Big brother is winning. These people, who just a few years ago were screaming about tyranny, are the ones using the tools that deliver tyranny right now.

Federal immigration officers often use facial recognition technology to identify immigrants in the field. Now, a newly revealed document from the Department of Homeland Security outlines plans to give local police working on its behalf the same type of technology.

The document, first reported earlier this month by the tech news outlet 404 media, is a Privacy Threshold Analysis, which is essentially a federal report assessing whether the privacy implications of a tool warrant further government study.

The tool in question is a mobile app called the ICE Task Force Module, which allows local police to scan the faces of people they stop in their communities.

The app then compares the facial scan against more than 250 million government records. Those include the State Department's visa records and records from the Traveler Verification Service, used by the Transportation Security Administration at airports to verify identities on international flights.

Once police scan a person's face, the app then instructs an officer either to "not detain or arrest," or it gives the officer a reference code to obtain more information from ICE.

The photos captured by the app are then stored in an internal DHS system for 15 years, the document states.

...

Those local officers, called "ICE non-federal law enforcement officers" in the document, are likely participants in the federal 287(g) program. A subset of that program, the Task Force Model, gives local police the authority to arrest immigrants on ICE's behalf during their routine police duties. There are about 1,300 police agencies participating in the Task Force Model nationwide.

The DHS analysis "raises more questions than I think it answers," says Clare Garvie, deputy director of the Technology Law and Policy Program at New York University School of Law's Policing Project.

For one, the document says the app launched last September, which suggests police are already using it.

It also seems to work similarly to Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app that ICE and officers with Customs and Border Protection already use, but it's unclear whether the new app uses the same technology or something entirely its own.

...

Privacy experts told NPR that allowing local police to conduct similar surveillance could create a chilling effect on freedom of speech, if people begin to worry they'll face repercussions for attending protests, for instance, or for legally observing ICE activity in their communities.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin acknowledged at a congressional hearing this month that the agency has used facial recognition technology on protesters and had been able to identify people who were present at protests in Oregon who were also at the recent protests outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, N.J.

What's more, Garvie says, facial recognition technology is not always accurate, and there have been cases of people detained by ICE who were wrongly identified by the technology.

...

"This app wouldn't work if they didn't have databases to pull people's pictures from and compare against," says Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy. "They're playing semantics. They're certainly not being forthright. You know, do they have a database of protesters? Maybe they don't call it that."

He says allowing police to use this technology to do immigration enforcement is a significant expansion of ICE's operations.

"It makes this sort of face surveillance ubiquitous on American streets," Quintin says. "I don't think that Americans should tolerate law enforcement being able to scan anyone's face at any time for any reason to try to determine their identity. This is the new form of 'papers, please.'"