ICE and the Smartphone Panopticon

Last week, as ICE raids ramped up in New York, city residents set about resisting in the ways they had available: confronting agents directly on sidewalks, haranguing them as they processed down blocks, and recording them on phone cameras held aloft. Relentless documentation has proved something of an effective tool against President Donald Trump’s empowerment of ICE; agents have taken to wearing masks in fear of exposure, and the proliferation of imagery showing armed police and mobilized National Guard troops in otherwise calm cities has underlined the cruel absurdity of their activities. Activist memes have been minted on social media: a woman on New York’s Canal Street, dressed in a polka-dotted office-casual dress, flipping ICE agents off; a man in Washington, D.C., throwing a Subway sandwich at a federal agent in August. The recent “No Kings” marches were filled with protesters in inflatable frog costumes, inspired by a similarly outfitted man who got pepper-sprayed protesting outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Building in Portland, Oregon. Some might write the memes off as resistance porn, but digital content is at least serving as a lively defense mechanism in the absence of functional politics.

At the same time, social media has served as a reinvigorated source of transparency in recent weeks, harking back to the days when Twitter became an organizing tool during the Arab Spring, in the early twenty-tens, or when Facebook and Instagram helped fuel the Black Lives Matter marches of 2020. The grassroots optimism of that earlier social-media era is long gone, though, replaced by a sense of posting as a last resort. After Trump authorized the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago earlier this month, the governor of Illinois, J. B. Pritzker, told residents to “record and narrate what you see—put it on social media.” But, if the anti-MAGA opposition is taking advantage of the internet, ICE and the Trump Administration are, too. Right-wing creators have been using the same channels to identify and publicize targets for raids. According to reporting in Semafor, the Trump-friendly YouTuber Nick Shirley’s videos of African migrant vendors on Canal Street seemed to help drive recent ICE sweeps of the area. ICE itself is also working to monitor social media. The investigative outlet The Lever found documents revealing that the agency has enlisted an A.I.-driven surveillance product called Zignal Labs that creates “curated detection feeds” to aid in criminal investigations. According to reporting in Wired, ICE also has plans to build out a team of dozens of analysts to monitor social media and identify targets. Recent videos, identified by 404 Media and other publications, have purportedly shown ICE agents using technology developed by the data-analytics firm Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel and others, to scan social-media accounts, government records, and biometrics data of those they detain. Social media has become a political panopticon in which your posts are a conduit for your politics, and what you post can increasingly be used against you.

Meanwhile, a new wave of digital tools has emerged to help surveil the surveillants. The apps ICEBlock, Red Dot, and DEICER all allow users to pinpoint where ICE agents are active, forming an online version of a whisper network to alert potential targets. Eyes Up provides a way for users to record and upload footage of abusive law-enforcement activity, building an archive of potential evidence. Its creator is a software developer named Mark (who uses only his first name to separate the project from his professional work); he was inspired to create Eyes Up earlier this year, when he began seeing clips of ICE abductions and harassment circulating on social media and worried about their shelf life. As he put it to me, “They could disappear at any given moment, whether the platforms decide to moderate, whether the individual deletes their account or the post.”

Ultimately, the app itself was also vulnerable to sudden disappearance. After launching, on September 1st, Eyes Up accumulated thousands of downloads and thousands of minutes of uploaded footage. Then, on October 3rd, Mark received a notice that Apple was removing the app from its store on the grounds that it may “harm a targeted individual or group.” Eyes Up is not alone. ICEBlock and Red Dot have been blocked from both Apple and Google’s app stores, the two largest marketplaces; DEICER, like Eyes Up, was removed by Apple. Pressure on the tech platforms seemed to come from the Trump Administration; after a deadly shooting at an ICE field office in Dallas in late September, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said in a statement to Fox News Digital that ICEBlock “put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.” Mark is contesting Apple’s decision about Eyes Up through its official channels, and the creator of ICEBlock, Joshua Aaron, has argued that his app should be treated no differently than services, such as Google’s Waze, that allow users to warn one another of highway speed traps. But for now they must try to make do with a limited reach.