Here's an example. One of my friends works for a manufacturing company. He attended a protest. The next day ICE called his employer and he was informed that if he attended another protest he would be fired. All this b/c he had a small company logo on his jacket.
The ability to en-mass record, lookup and intimidate citizens is unprecedented and while I have no hard proof that this is due to Palantir, it sure smells like it
ICE employees working to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same”, such as exercise of 1st Amendment rights, is itself super-illegal (not just “outside their authority” but a federal criminal violation of the KKK Act), whether or not the employer’s response to the resulting pressure is also illegal.
My understanding (and I couldn't get past the app paywall) is that Palantir is joining databases from many different federal and state agencies, including passport and driver license photos. The app then allows you to scan a phase and it finds a match. It returns information on the person found, including citizenship.
The existence of this technology means that ICE can grab anyone they want, scan their face, and instantly have (or not have) probable cause to arrest them. Without the app, there would be hours before probably cause could be established which makes justifying the detainment legally much harder. I.e without the app, ICE has to actually build a case or see something suspicious for each target. With the app, ICE can just mass sweep people.
Which should be illegal, but thanks to the shadow docket order on Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, is happening anyway.
CBP has been taking photos of all legitimate foreign visitors to the US for over 20 years. I presume any catch-and-release border apprehensions are subject to the same photographs.
How hard is it to do facial recognition on just this dataset in real-time?
Eh, joining these datasets can be challenging. Names can be spelled differently or changed, dates of birth can be off, people can share names and dates of births, addresses change and are can be expressed in multiple ways, databases may store names as a single string or separate fields, middle names may be missing or initials, databases might not share IDs etc. So it's kinda hard to do well although nothing really exciting technology wise.
This, incidentally, is why the "confidence score" is needed. And why the app frequently gets data (including citizenship) wrong.
