ICE officials have invited tech companies, including Microsoft, to develop algorithms that will track visa holders’ social media activity

by George Joseph

The Department of Immigration & Customs Enforcement is taking new steps in its plans for monitoring the social media accounts of applicants and holders of U.S. visas. At a tech industry conference last Thursday in Arlington, Virginia, ICE officials explained to software providers what they are seeking: algorithms that would assess potential threats posed by visa holders in the United States and conduct ongoing social media surveillance of those deemed high risk.

The comments provide the first clear blueprint for ICE’s proposed augmentation of its visa-vetting program. The initial announcement of the plans this summer, viewed as part of President Donald Trump’s calls for the “extreme vetting” of visitors from Muslim countries, stoked a public outcry from immigrants and civil liberties advocates. They argued that such a plan would discriminate against Muslim visitors and potentially place a huge number of individuals under watch.

ICE officials subsequently changed the program’s name to “Visa Lifecycle Vetting.” But, according to the ICE presentation, the goal of the initiative — enhanced monitoring of visa holders using social media — remains the same.

Speaking to a room of information-technology contractors, hosted by the Government Technology & Services Coalition, Louis Rodi, deputy assistant director of ICE Homeland Security Investigations’ National Security Program, said the agency needs a tool equipped with “risk-based matrices” to predict dangers posed by visa holders, with the social media of those considered a threat under continuous surveillance throughout their stay in the U.S.

“We have millions and millions and millions of people coming every year, and subsequently departing, so we have to be smart about it,” said Rodi to a room of representatives from companies like Microsoft, Accenture, Deloitte and Motorola Solutions. “And I’m sure there are tools out there that can help.”

For this targeted group of visa holders, ICE’s online monitoring of public social media posts would be large-scale and non-stop. “Everything we’re dealing with is in bulk, so we need batch-vetting capabilities for any of the processes that we have,” said Rodi. Alysa Erichs, ICE Homeland Security Investigations’ acting deputy association director for information management, told attendees that ICE hopes to get automated notifications about any visa holders’ social media activity that could “ping us as a potential alert.”

ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell stressed to ProPublica that the Department of Homeland Security has not actually begun building any such program. “The request for information on this initiative was simply that — an opportunity to gather information from industry professionals and other government agencies on current technological capabilities to determine the best way forward,” Cutrell wrote in an email. The program would require clearance from numerous DHS units, including the Privacy Office and the Principal Legal Advisor, before it could be implemented, according to a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In his speech, Rodi referred to meetings ICE has had with companies but did not mention any frontrunners. The major tech companies present at the conference, including Microsoft, Accenture and Deloitte, either declined to comment or didn’t respond to ProPublica’s request to comment about their level of interest in providing technology for the vetting program. Microsoft has opposed Trump’s immigration policies, and several Microsoft researchers have publicly called for ICE to stop spying on visitors’ social media.

ICE is already monitoring some social media at eight Homeland Security Investigation posts internationally, Rodi said, and the plan is to expand to more sites. In response to a question posed by ProPublica from the audience, he stated that the department was open to other social media monitoring techniques, such as link analysis (which helps authorities map out applicants’ online connections), so long as they solely rely on public posts.

The ICE officials emphasized the Trump administration’s strict stance. “This administration is big on immigration enforcement, so we’re not going to look the other way like we have in the past when we have overstays,” said Rodi. “Maybe it’s an administrative violation — it’s still a crime. These people need to pay. They can’t get away with it.”

Some analysts argue that gathering social media data is necessary. ICE already has a tool that searches for connections to terrorists, according to Claude Arnold, a former ICE Homeland Security Investigations special agent, now with the security firm Frontier Solutions. But, he said, potential terrorist threats often come from countries, such as Iraq or Syria, that provide little intelligence to U.S. authorities. As a result, in Arnold’s view, social media information is all the more important.

Privacy advocates take a darker view. “ICE is building a dangerously broad tool that could be used to justify excluding, or deporting, almost anyone,” said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology. “They are talking about this as a targeted tool, but the numbers tell a different story.”

Bedoya noted that the program outline originally anticipated that the monitoring would identify 10,000 high-risk visa holders a year. That suggests the pool of people under social media surveillance would be many orders of magnitude larger. (ICE officials did not address this point at the conference.)

Last week, a coalition of academics and technologists warned in a public letter that ICE’s interest in using big data algorithms to assess risk is misguided, given how rare it is for foreign visitors to be involved in terrorist attacks in the U.S. That means there’s little historical data to mine in hopes of using it to design a new algorithm. The letter cited a Cato Institute analysis that found that the likelihood of an American dying in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in any given year was 1 in 3.6 million in the period between 1975 and 2015.

by Barry Lynn and Matt Stoller

On Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana told the general counsels of Facebook and Google: “Your power sometimes scares me.” The problem, Kennedy said, is that the corporations know too much about us, and too little about themselves.

Kennedy illustrated his fears with two rhetorical questions. “If the CEO came to you … and said I want to know everything we can find out about Senator Graham … You could do that, couldn’t you?” On the other hand, Kennedy said: “You don’t have the ability to know who every one of [your] advertisers is, do you?”

This seeming paradox points to a fundamental problem that Facebook and Google cannot solve on their own; these institutions are designed to gather vast amounts of information about every American, but they are not built to manage that information in the interest of those individuals or the public as a whole, such as by preventing Russian hackers from targeting propaganda at specific voters.

It will take time to figure out how to ensure Google, Facebook and the other giant platform monopolists truly serve the political and commercial interests of the American people. The good news is that there’s a simple way to at least slow the rate at which the problem is getting worse. Don’t allow these dominant platforms to buy other companies.

If it’s clear that Facebook and Google can’t manage what they already control, why let those corporations own more? America’s antitrust enforcers can impose such a rule almost immediately.

For one thing, there is no doubt these corporations qualify for antitrust regulation. Facebook, for instance, has 77 percent of mobile social networking traffic in the United States, with just over half of all American adults using Facebook every day.

Nearly all new online advertising spending goes to just Facebook and Google, and those two companies refer over half of all traffic to news websites. In all, Facebook has some 2 billion users around the world.

For another, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have all the authority they need under existing law. Indeed, the FTC itself partially created the “fake news” problem by failing to use its existing authority to block previous acquisitions by these platforms such as Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Had those companies been allowed to grow and compete with Facebook, we would today see less power and control concentrated in that one corporation. The history of the platform monopolies themselves provides ample evidence of the power that comes from buying other people’s technologies.

One of the myths of the tech platforms is that they are innovative actors who invent new ways of doing things. They really aren’t. They are conglomerates.

Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in a project financed by a National Science Foundation grant, created a way to rank web pages that allowed them to build a very good search engine. They then used cash earned or raised off this early success to buy most of the rest of Google’s key products, including YouTube, Android, Deep Mind, Waze and Doubleclick. At a certain point a few years ago, Google was buying roughly one company a week.

Another lesson of history is that temporary restrictions on how these corporations can use their newly acquired technologies don’t solve the fundamental problem. Seven years ago, Google paid $700m for a company called ITA that provides software for the travel industry. The Department of Justice approved the deal on the condition that Google keep access to the software open to other businesses for at least five years. This year, Google closed that access. As Ted Benson, a former Googler, put it: “That’s an entire ecosystem of airfare startups executed with the stroke of a pen.”

These corporations already enjoy vast advantages over any potential rivals. In the case of Facebook, those advantages verge on being blatantly unfair. In 2013, Facebook bought a mobile data analytics company called “Onavo”. As a recent article in the Wall Street Journal made clear, Onavo allows Facebook to observe the online behavior of internet users, providing Facebook executives with an “unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones.”

Facebook, in essence, gets to see which products are doing well and what features within those products users especially appreciate. It can then use this information to target fast-growing rivals with potentially fatal copycat techniques, and attempt to buy out these competitors.

A few weeks ago, Facebook bought a three-month old social networking company called TBH, which was growing quickly among teenagers. It’s not clear why Facebook bought the company. But it is clear this acquisition will only further entrench Facebook’s monopoly position in social media and expand its power over all competitors.

For this reason, we at the Open Market Institute recently called on the FTC to put a hold on all future mergers and acquisitions by Facebook – and potentially Google and Amazon. Such a ban on mergers would leave many big problems answered. It would not fix the Facebook and Google’s duopoly over online advertising, nor would it prevent foreign actors from using the company’s network to manipulate American voters.

But such a ban would help provide the American people with the time we need to figure out how to ensure these immensely powerful monopolies no longer threaten our most fundamental civic, artistic, economic and political freedoms.

(Barry Lynn is the Executive Director of the Open Markets Institute. Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute).