ICE Uses Palantir/Cambridge Analytica Data From Facebook/WhatsApp to Target Migrants With Assets to Seize
The company, which was also backed by the CIA’s venture capital arm, has acknowledged contracts with the federal government. But a company statement to the New York Times in December took pains to point out that its ICE contract was with the division responsible for cross-border criminal investigations, not the division for enforcement and removals.
However, the 2017 document made public this week shows that the arrest and deportation operation, which yielded more than 400 arrests, was a joint operation between those two divisions.
“Palantir’s software was used throughout helping agents build profiles of immigrant children and their family members for the prosecution and arrest of any undocumented person they encountered in their investigation,” Mijente says in its blog post.
The first piece about this came out in 2017, from The Intercept - one of the more controversial aspects is a piece of technology called “SEACATS” which apparently tracks property to be seized:
The allegations are that Palatir’s data-targeting abilities are used to identify targets for deportation that have assets that the Feds can then seize and sell for profit.
The ICM documents appear to contain information about FALCON that is not otherwise publicly available. One funding document states that FALCON — and thus ICM — can link to a controversial law enforcement database called Black Asphalt, which is maintained by a private firm called Desert Snow and provides information to help police engage in civil and criminal asset forfeiture. Iowa and Kansas have prohibited the use of Black Asphalt by law enforcement agencies because of concerns that it “might not be a legal law enforcement tool,” according to the Washington Post. The funding documents also state that FALCON includes access to services provided by Cellebrite, an Israeli company that specializes in software used to breach cellphones.
So they use Black Asphalt to identify migrant groups who have money, cars, houses - and then use Israeli phone-spying tech to track their movements, and then ultimately round them up.
This is SO FUCKED on so many levels.