Agents use facial recognition, social media monitoring and other tech tools not only to identify undocumented immigrants but also to track protesters, current and former officials said.

  • mesa@piefed.socialOP
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    13 hours ago

    One of the tools, which was built by Paragon, an Israeli technology company, lets people take control of phones or remotely hack into them to read messages or track locations. The others were built by Penlink, a Nebraska-based software company. They use social media data scraped from the web and information from data brokers to help build dossiers of anyone with a social media account.

    ICE’s use of facial recognition software was documented in videos and photos from local activist groups in Minnesota this month and reviewed by The Times. Two photos captured fatigue-clad agents using cellphones to scan the faces of protesters in Minneapolis, while in one video, agents could be heard telling people that they were being recorded with facial recognition technology and that their faces would be added to a database.