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The lethal force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is meting out on American streets is rightly drawing loud condemnations from politicians and editorial boards across the nation and around the world. Now is the time we must start paying attention to another highly damaging part of ICE’s arsenal: the agency’s deployment of mass surveillance.
I’m referring specifically to Mobile Fortify, a specialized app ICE has been using at least since May 2025. (Usage of the app was first reported last June by 404Media.) What is Mobile Fortify? It’s an app for facial recognition that can additionally take “contactless fingerprints” of someone simply by snapping a picture of a person’s fingers. The app has been used more than 100,000 times, including on children, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago. And it’s dangerous.
After taking someone’s picture, an ICE agent can now scan for that person’s face or fingerprints in a host of government databases that reportedly include over 200 million images. The agent will immediately obtain vast amounts of information on that person, including name and date of birth, possible citizenship status, names of family members, markers like alien registration numbers and much more.
ICE is reportedly using the app on people it suspects of being in the country without authorization, but this presumption comes with its own host of problems. (ICE is also believed to be scanning random people of color on the streets to determine citizenship.) Representative Bennie G Thompson, the ranking member of the House homeland security committee, told 404Media that ICE considers “an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify [to be] a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship – including a birth certificate – if the app says the person is an alien”.
It gets worse. In a document obtained by 404Media, the government admits that “it is conceivable that a photo taken by an agent using the Mobile Fortify mobile application could be that of someone other than an alien, including US citizens or lawful permanent residents”. No one, citizen or non-citizen, is allowed to opt out, either. And, as the document states, “[e]very new photograph or fingerprint, regardless of match, is an encounter and stored and retained in ATS [Automated Targeting System] for 15 years”.
Fifteen years is an absurdly long time to retain such data. As a point of comparison, the TSA’s use of facial recognition is optional, and the agency says it deletes photographs after verification has been made. Then again, testimony during a 21 January hearing revealed that the TSA has been assisting ICE by checking passenger information for immigration enforcement operations.
This kind of technology is clearly not limited to the US. In Gaza, the Israeli military has also widely employed facial recognition to conduct mass surveillance, and it’s been used to identify and detain Palestinians, as reported by the New York Times. The Times also reported that the “technology struggled” in its mission, so the military began supplementing their search results by using Google Photos. Is there a connection between the extremely intrusive mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza and the mass surveillance happening on our streets? Put another way, are we too being transformed into overly surveilled subjects, like Palestinians in the occupied territories?
Today’s facial recognition tools are often roundly criticized for their inaccuracy, as they should be. Such occurrences are legion. Facial recognition has always been better at identifying white men than other people. One 2018 study led by a researcher at MIT found the maximum error rate in facial recognition software for light-skinned men was 0.8%. The error rate for darker skinned women was 34.7%.
And the consequences of such biases are real. In New Jersey in February 2019, Nijeer Parks was wrongly arrested for stealing a candy bar and attempting to run over a police officer. He did nothing of the kind, but Parks, who is Black, was misidentified by the police’s facial recognition software. He ended up spending 10 days in jail and almost 10 months being prosecuted for a crime he didn’t commit. (Parks is suing the Woodbridge olice department.)
Last October, ICE twice misidentified a woman while using Mobile Fortify in Oregon. Agents snapped pictures and queried the app two different times, and each time the app returned a different incorrect name for the same person.
So bias is certainly a real problem, but wrong results are really only the tip of this techno-authoritarian nightmare we’re now facing. The technology will almost certainly get even more sophisticated and as the tech improves, it’s possible these systems will become more accurate. Yet, the core problem will remain because precision is not the real issue.
No other organization in American society can wield power the way the government can. The government is entitled to take your money through taxation, take your liberty through a criminal legal system and even take your life through legally sanctioned execution. The check on this enormous amount of power is that the people retain the right not only to create and recreate the government through elections, but also to challenge the government through (what should be) an independent arbiter found in the courts.
But when the government knows almost everything about you, can track virtually all your movements, can create networks of association based on those it assumes are your friends, and can gather this information without seeking authorization from the courts and can retain the information for years on end, simply by aiming a phone at you, then the next logical step is that this same government will use that information to predict what you will do and what you will think.
And what’s to stop that same government from using this information to intimidate those it deems as dissenting or even just insufficiently patriotic? The unchecked, centralized accumulation of citizen information creates the architecture for authoritarian rule. Just ask the former East Germans. This is why, in a democracy, it is the people who hold the right to privacy and the government which must operate in public. It cannot be the other way around.
Elaine Scarry, an American philosopher, recognized this very fact more than 20 years ago, after the USA Patriot Act, the key piece of legislation of the “war on terror”, was passed. It is the “war on terror” that has laid the infrastructure for the mass surveillance society and the imperial presidency we have today. “The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people’s lives be private and the work of government officials be public,” Scarry wrote. “It instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque.”
Privacy, we should note, is not the same thing as secrecy. In fact, privacy is more fundamental. Privacy is a vital part of being human. The human capacity to make some things public while keeping other things private is key to learning how to trust others, how to build community and how even to develop ourselves. So when a government eliminates the privacy of its people, it is in effect removing part of each person’s humanity. Privacy is “the foundation of moral autonomy and liberty”, Scarry explained. “Inhabitants of a country who lose the guarantee of privacy also eventually lose the capacity for making friends and the capacity for political freedom.”
With the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the last month has shown us that stopping ICE from shooting civilians in the street is an imperative if we want to save the lives of innocent people. What should also be clear now is that stopping ICE from shooting pictures of us through apps like Mobile Fortify is just as necessary if we also want to save our democracy.
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Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
