ICE Will Use AI to Surveil Social Media
A Silicon Valley firm has contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to build out a social media surveillance dragnet. Critics say that the AI-driven software will target immigrants for political speech.
ICE may soon be deploying AI to surveil your social media posts for wrongthink. (Octavio Jones / AFP via Getty Images)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has inked a new $5.7 million contract for AI-driven social media surveillance software, according to federal procurement records reviewed by The Lever. It’s the latest move in the agency’s ongoing quest to build out a social media surveillance dragnet.
The five-year contract with government technology middleman Carahsoft Technology, made public in September, provides Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) licenses for a product called Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring platform used by the Israeli military and the Pentagon.
An informational pamphlet marked confidential but publicly available online advertises that Zignal Labs “leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning” to analyze over eight billion social media posts per day, providing “curated detection feeds” for its clients. The information, the company says, allows law enforcement to “detect and respond to threats with greater clarity and speed.”
The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has in the past procured Zignal licenses for the US Secret Service, signing its first contract for the software in 2019. The company also has contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation.
But the September notice appears to be the first indication that ICE has access to the platform. The licenses will be provided to Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s intelligence unit, to provide “real-time data analysis for criminal investigations,” per the disclosure.
Zignal joins ICE’s growing arsenal of social media surveillance tools, many of which employ artificial intelligence to generate leads and identify “threats” from vast quantities of online data. These tools pose a particular threat as ICE, under the Trump administration, appears to be increasingly using social media to direct its immigration enforcement strategy.
Several pro-Palestinian activists, including Mahmoud Khalil, were targeted and jailed by immigration authorities after being doxed online by right-wing, pro-Israel blacklist websites like Canary Mission. Just this week, immigration agents raided street vendors in New York City after a right-wing influencer posted a video of the block online, demanding action by authorities.
Last week, a group of labor unions sued over the federal government’s growing use of social media surveillance to target immigrants for their political speech, calling it a “mass, viewpoint-driven surveillance program.”
And there are indications that ICE intends to further expand its social media surveillance capabilities. As Wired reported earlier this month, ICE has plans to develop a round-the-clock social media monitoring team to identify leads for immigration enforcers.
Advocates told The Lever that ICE’s purchase of Zignal Labs licenses, like its other uses of digital surveillance tech, raises civil liberty concerns.
“[The Department of Homeland Security] should not be buying surveillance tools that scrape our social media posts off the internet and then use AI to scrutinize our online speech,” said Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “And agencies certainly shouldn’t be deploying this kind of black box technology in secret without any accountability.”
“Tactical Intelligence” to Israel and the Pentagon
Zignal Labs, founded in Silicon Valley in 2011, initially catered to public relations firms and political campaigns, advertising data analytics and media monitoring to help identify and respond to narrative trends online.
But like the many private companies that now provide digital surveillance tools to the federal government, Zignal Labs soon moved into the defense and intelligence industries, formally announcing the new focus, along with a “public sector advisory board” staffed by industry veterans, in 2021. One Zignal pamphlet from this year advertises the company’s work with the Israeli military, saying its data analytics platform provides “tactical intelligence” to “operators on the ground” in Gaza. The pamphlet also highlights Zignal’s work with the US Marines and the State Department.
Zignal Labs did not return a request for comment about its work with Israeli forces or its new contract with ICE.
The unions’ lawsuit over the Trump administration’s use of social media surveillance details the myriad digital surveillance tools that ICE already has at its disposal, including ShadowDragon, a software that uses publicly available websites to map out an individual’s online activity, and Babel X, which links social media profiles and location information to a target’s Social Security number.
“We’ve been seeing an uptick in ICE surveillance contracts,” said Julie Mao, an attorney with Just Futures Law, a legal advocacy group that closely monitors ICE’s surveillance regime.
This week, ICE signed a $7 million contract with the firm SOS International LLC, for “skip tracing services,” a term that refers to tracking a person’s whereabouts, per federal procurement records reviewed by The Lever. The multimillion-dollar contract comes just three months after SOS International LLC, which also does business as SOSi, announced that the company had hired Andre Watson, an ICE Homeland Security Investigations intelligence chief, to “expand [the company’s] business and deliver capabilities to state and federal law enforcement agencies.”
Many of these services tout that their surveillance capabilities are enhanced by artificial intelligence, including Zignal. In a July post announcing the latter company’s partnership with Carahsoft Technology, Zignal’s CEO boasted that the latest iteration of the software used AI to scour global digital data, “helping defense and intelligence teams detect and respond to threats with greater clarity and speed.” Two months after this announcement, ICE signed its new contract with Carahsoft for Zignal licenses.
ICE’s use of AI to surveil vast swathes of the internet in real time presents serious privacy and free speech concerns, the labor unions argued in their lawsuit against the Trump administration.
“The government’s utilization of AI and automated tools for viewpoint-driven online surveillance gives teeth to its threat to surveil ‘everyone’ online for disfavored expression,” attorneys with the civil liberties group the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic wrote in the complaint, saying that such tools “exacerbate the chilling impact of that surveillance.”