A huge slogan board stands in front of the US Capitol building during a protest against government surveillance in Washington DC, capital of the United Sates, on Oct 26, 2013. Photo:Xinhua

In an ordinary morning in the United States of America, you wake up, have your breakfast and drive to work. Uh-oh! You're now under surveillance, not only by the CIA or FBI, but also the immigration enforcement. 

This is not persecutory delusion, but real life scenario. A recent report found that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has built a massive surveillance network that gives it access to almost every person in America. Your records could end up in the hands of ICE simply because you drive on the roads or sign up for access to heat, water and electricity, and such process is almost without any judicial, legislative or public oversight.

The research report, entitled "American Dragnet: Data-driven Deportation in the 21st Century," was released by US Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology in May 2022. After two years of investigation, researchers found that ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system that makes it now more of a surveillance agency than an immigration authority. It has played a key role in the federal government's push to amass as much information as possible about US citizens' lives.

Where does ICE get your information? Everywhere

"ICE surveillance is broader than people realize. It is a dragnet," writes the research team.

ICE taps the digital records of state and local governments and databases with billions of data points from private companies, with information streams including driving records and utility customer information, as well as call records, children welfare records, credit information, employment records, geolocation information, healthcare records, housing records and social media posts - basically what one needs in order to stay alive in the US society.

The report finds that ICE has scanned the driver's license photos of 1 in 3 adults, has access to the driver's license data of 3 in 4 adults, and could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.

By contracting with private data brokers, ICE has been able to access utility record information belonging to over 218 million utility customers across the country.

With tentacles into almost every corner you can think of in the modern society, ICE has created "a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time."

Ever-expanding surveillance and budget, without supervision

After reviewing over 100,000 ICE spending transactions from 2008 to 2021, researchers concluded that ICE's annual spending on surveillance programs grew more than fivefold during this period, skyrocketing from about $71 million to about $388 million per year. In the 13 years, the agency spent approximately $2.8 billion on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing initiatives. 

To put it in perspective, the US federal spending on the welfare program for job training was $5 billion in 2021, according to Federal Safety Net. When every $13 is spent to help citizens get jobs, one buck disappears into the secret act of mining their private data.

Such a striking amount is just a tip of the iceberg. What massive surveillance demands such a massive budget? That's still an untold story.

That all of these have been going on largely unknown and unsupervised makes it all the more astonishing. "Congress has not had oversight on ICE surveillance spending or ICE surveillance at large," said Dan Bateyko, one of the authors of the report.

Information weaponized: more powerful than you can imagine

ICE has been leveraging the trust that people place in state agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite with their families. 

With data provided by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), ICE accesses the information of unaccompanied children and their family members, and has used it to find and arrest at least 400 of those family members. The Well News confirmed an incident in 2020 in which an undocumented immigrant was taken away after applying for a driver's license in Maryland. 

Such acts are particularly devastating, as "we made a promise to these individuals to trust government," said Cathryn Paul, government relations and public policy manager at CASA, an advocacy-and-assistance organization based in Maryland. "And everything in this report shows ICE is abusing that trust." 

According to a report in The Hill, ICE developed a GPS phone app called Smartlink to track immigrants during the pandemic, claiming it is only to ensure immigrants who are released from detention would attend deportation hearings. In fact the app has been used on a large number of immigrants with no criminal records and no detention requirements. And it is not known whether there are other hidden uses.

As American Civil Liberties Union writes on its website, the consequences of such surveillance fall particularly on communities of color, who are wrongly and disproportionately subject to surveillance. "The people who feel the impact the most are Muslims, Black and Brown people, people of Asian descent, and others who have long been subject to wrongful profiling and discrimination in the name of national security." 

The report on dragnet surveillance by ICE is another wake-up call for the people of America as well as the world. In the US, there is no boundary to the unscrupulous and pervasive collection of people's personal information by government agencies. Ironically, the country that talks loudest about the rule of law and human rights is in fact the one that has undermined them the most. 

The author is a commentator on international affairs, writing regularly for Global Times, China Daily, etc. He can be reached at xinping604@gmail.com.