ICE Has An Internet Surveillance Power Tool That Keeps Tabs On More Than 200 Websites
The DHS and its main anti-immigration component, ICE, have always been big fans of social media surveillance. This has been part of the so-called “enhanced screening” protocols for several years now, deployed against foreign residents upon arrival in this nation, whether at border crossings or international airports where they’re just flying in for a short-term visit.
ICE has utilized a variety of tech tools to accomplish massive amounts of surveillance, ranging from purchasing location data from third-party data brokers to helping itself to utility bill databases to help it hunt down undocumented immigrants.
The latest collect-it-all tech being utilized by ICE continuously harvests and collates data and communications pulled from dozens of social media services and websites, as Joseph Cox reports for 404 Media.
A contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and many other U.S. government agencies has developed a tool that lets analysts more easily pull a target individual’s publicly available data from a wide array of sites, social networks, apps, and services across the web at once, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, and various Meta platforms, according to a leaked list of the sites obtained by 404 Media. In all the list names more than 200 sites that the contractor, called ShadowDragon, pulls data from and makes available to its government clients, allowing them to map out a person’s activity, movements, and relationships.
The entire list [PDF] covers far more than the usual social media services used by billions around the globe. It also targets lots of off-the-beaten internet path sites, like services catering to furries, car owners (Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Subaru, Stellantis, and General Motors are all on the list), bodybuilders, book readers, users of multiple dating sites, house hunters, porn watchers, and tech-ish browsers who might use sites like YCombinator (a.k.a., the home of HackerNews) and Github. Also on the list (somewhat surprisingly): TruthSocial and Rumble, sites largely known for catering to Trump and his white nationalist buddies. (Signal is also targeted, but it’s unlikely anything useful is being harvested from that service.)
It may not just be foreign residents or undocumented residents being subjected to this form of surveillance. As Cox notes in his report, ShadowDragon’s marketing materials point out it can be used to “monitor protests” and suggests it has already has been used for this purpose (with or without a government directive — the text doesn’t make it clear) during Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, DC in 2023. On top of that, ICE has already made it clear it wants to erect a social media dragnet just so it can seek out people who are critical of the agency and its actions.
It basically seems like Clearview, but without the facial recognition component. A ton of stuff is scraped from the open web and all anyone needs to search this database is literally any information at all ICE might have about the people they’re looking to locate.
In one promotional video, ShadowDragon says users can enter “an email, an alias, a name, a phone number, a variety of different things, and immediately have information on your target. We can see interests, we can see who friends are, pictures, videos.”
Beyond the obvious chilling effect this creates, as well as the shaky legal ground underpinning bulk harvesting of data and communications, there’s the potential this has to generate false positives that ICE officers will treat as all the justification they need to arrest, detain, and eject people who are actually in this country legally. We’ve already seen green card holders and travelers with temporary visas being thrown into indefinite detention despite possessing all the proper paperwork.
On top of that, ShadowDragon’s tool is pretty much just a web scraper that violates the terms of use of pretty much every site/service it harvests data from. The ends can’t justify the means. The company claims it doesn’t perform searches of the listed sites for data until a customer requests one, but whether or not it’s actually a live query, it still involves running scripts that scrape data from sites that forbid this practice. It’s not a tech logging into each site and running searches the way normal humans do. If that’s all it was, there would be no reason to pay for the service.
Whatever the real facts are, we probably won’t see them until ICE moves on to the next, more powerful option. All we have right now is the leaked list, ShadowDragon’s promotional materials, ICE’s refusal to comment, and its contractor’s public statement, which insists this is all so extremely legal it couldn’t possibly even violate the terms of use of the 200+ sites it pulls data from. What cannot be argued is that the government wants more eyes in more places with each passing year. When the only way to stay unseen is to fall off the ‘net completely, it’s clear there’s no real “trade off” between privacy and public safety happening here.