How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are

[highplainsdem]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/technology/tech-ice-facial-recognition-palantir.html

ICE is using two facial recognition programs in Minnesota, they said, including one made by the tech company Clearview AI and a newer program, Mobile Fortify. The agency is also using cellphone and social media tools to monitor people’s online activity and potentially hack into phones. And agents are tapping into a database, built by the data analytics company Palantir, that combines government and commercial data to identify real-time locations for individuals they are pursuing, the current and former officials said.

“The technologies are being deployed, or appear to be deployed, in a much more aggressive way than we have seen in the past,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued the Homeland Security Department over the immigration operation in Minneapolis. “The conglomeration of all these technologies together is giving the government unprecedented abilities.”

-snip-

In September, the Homeland Security Department also spent nearly $10 million acquiring at least three social media monitoring tools and services that allow it to delve into people’s cellphones, according to procurement records and public contracts for the project.

One of the tools, which was built by Paragon, an Israeli technology company, lets people take control of phones or remotely hack into them to read messages or track locations. The others were built by Penlink, a Nebraska-based software company. They use social media data scraped from the web and information from data brokers to help build dossiers of anyone with a social media account.

[TommyT139]

1. Protect Yourself

... especially if you are queer, a person of color, or vulnerable to abduction for other reasons.

Remember that photos on social media can also be used for facial recognition; ICE & DHS have been monitoring several hundred of the largest social media sites for several years at least.

From Jan. 5th:

The State of Anti-Surveillance Design.
The most effective surveillance-evading gear might already be in your closet.

https://www.404media.co/the-state-of-anti-surveillance-design/

https://archive.ph/5u7Cg

[yellow dahlia]

2. In this cacophany of scary stories, this is one of the most chilling.

We have become a surveillance state. The United States of America!

[Tim S]

3. And DOGE was all about consolidating the siloed info about us and stealing it

The Federal government used to have safeguards on the data they possessed so that no one has a *complete* view of each person in the US. Each department has only what they needed you do their job.

Elon Musk’s job was to grab all these disparate databases and consolidate them into a singular, definitive database that spy tools can use. He was successful. That’s what Trump has now and he’s using it.

This data is too valuable for anyone to destroy every copy. I don’t know what happens from here, friends.

[cynical_idealist]

4. Tesla cars have 5 or more cameras

each

[OC375]

5. Of Course They Do

Make a strength a weakness. Classic tactic.