Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureaucrats are reportedly planning to use specialty facial recognition glasses to collect data on Americans in real time, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed.
Financial statements viewed by Klippenstein point to the development of a facial recognition platform modeled after commercially available AI smart glasses, like Meta’s widely-panned “pervert glasses.” ICE’s in-house model, it seems, will allow agents to monitor video and reference vast federal databases of biometric information on subjects regardless of if they’ve been arrested, or even charged with a crime.
“The project will deliver innovative hardware, such as operational prototypes of smart glasses, to equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field,” read an ICE budget document leaked to Klippenstein.
Perhaps most alarmingly, Department of Homeland Security insiders told the investigative journalist that the technology involved isn’t limited to immigration enforcement.
“It might be portrayed as seeking to identify illegal aliens on the streets,” one anonymous DHS attorney told Klippenstein, “but the reality is that a push in this direction affects all Americans, particularly protestors.”
That reveal comes just a few months after an incident in Maine in which an ICE agent admitted to scanning protestors’ faces with his phone. “We have a nice little database, and now you’re considered domestic terrorists,” the agent tells a couple who were out documenting the immigration agents in their community.
In October, 404 Media reported that ICE agents were scanning peoples’ faces in order to check whether they were citizens. These targets for surveillance are often chosen at random — we now know that many of ICE’s arrests over the past year have been circumstantial, a far cry from the targeted enforcement of known criminals the Trump administration promised.
Taken together, what began as surveillance infrastructure marketed for catching illegal immigrants now seems to be coming for residents as well. ICE’s smart glasses represent the next iteration of a creeping panopticon that, once in place, will be nearly impossible to uproot — as the history of US immigration enforcement and domestic surveillance has shown us time and again.
More on facial recognition: Madison Square Garden Reportedly Used Facial Recognition to Stalk Trans Woman For Two Years
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