ICE is building a social media panopticon

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement carries out raids across the country, the agency is working rapidly to expand an online surveillance system that could potentially track millions of users on the web. Federal records uncovered by The Lever reveal that ICE is paying $5.7 million to use an AI-powered social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs, something Will Owen, the communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), calls an “assault” on democracy and free speech.

The “real-time intelligence” platform is capable of ingesting and analyzing vast amounts of publicly available data, like social media posts, according to its website. In a pamphlet shared by The Lever, Zignal Labs says it uses machine learning, computer vision, and optical character recognition to analyze more than 8 billion posts per day in over 100 languages. This allows it to process and sort data into “curated detection feeds” that ICE could use to flag individuals for deportation.

The pamphlet highlights Zignal’s ability to capture geolocated images and videos while providing alerts and information to “operators.” One example states that Zignal Labs used its technology to analyze a Telegram video showing “the precise location of an ongoing operation in Gaza.” The company says its tool identified emblems and patches to “confirm the operators involved,” allowing it to notify operators on the ground. That means ICE could potentially trace someone’s location based on the location attached to a video posted on TikTok, or even a picture on Facebook.

ICE procured the contract with Zignal Labs through Carahsoft, a firm that deploys IT solutions for government agencies. Zignal Labs most recently partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to analyze weather events from public and online media sources. It also inked a contract with the US Secret Service in 2019 and works with the Department of Defense and Department of Transportation, according to The Lever. The Verge reached out to Zignal Labs with a request for more information about its contract with ICE but didn’t immediately hear back.

Surveillance on social media isn’t anything new. In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union found that police were using a CIA-backed tool called Geofeedia to track protesters of police brutality across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But with billions of dollars in funding, ICE has the budget to employ an array of social media monitoring tools that could lead to arrests and deportations across the country.

“With billions of dollars to spend on spyware, it’s extremely alarming to think how far ICE will go in surveilling social media,” Owen says. “ICE is a lawless agency that will use AI-driven social media monitoring not only to terrorize immigrant families, but also to target activists fighting back against their abuses. This is an assault on our democracy and right to free speech, powered by the algorithm and paid for with our tax dollars.”

Earlier this month, a report from Wired revealed that ICE plans to hire almost 30 workers to comb through content on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, and other social platforms to “locate individuals who pose a danger to national security, public safety, and/or otherwise meet ICE’s law enforcement mission.”

A document seen by Wired shows that ICE is requesting information from contractors who could help the agency carry out the initiative, which may even require workers to search for data about a target’s family members, friends, or coworkers to pinpoint their whereabouts for ICE officers. The document notes that ICE would place around 12 contractors in a monitoring facility in Vermont, while 16 staff members would work in California, with some required to be available “at all times.”

David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells The Verge that automated and AI-powered monitoring tools will give the government the ability to “monitor social media for viewpoints it doesn’t like on a scale that was never possible with human review alone.” Greene adds, “The scale of this spying is matched by an equally massive chilling effect on free speech.”

Outside social media, 404 Media reports that ICE has tapped into license plate-scanning security cameras, as well as gained access to a tool that tracks the movement of millions of phones.

The Trump administration’s social media surveillance plans extend beyond ICE, with Citizenship and Immigration Services proposing an initiative that would require people applying for US citizenship or personal residency to provide their social media account handles. In 2019, the State Department began requiring some visa applicants to list their social media handles on sites they’ve used within the past year, but the agency expanded it to include more kinds of nonimmigrant visas in June.

The US government has already started trawling social media for posts that don’t align with the Trump administration’s viewpoints. In March, it began an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” initiative to track down posts from student visa holders that appear to be in support of Hamas or other designated terror organizations. The State Department also announced earlier this month that it revoked the visas of six people who the US claimed “celebrated” the shooting of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk. This week, ICE arrested nine street vendors on New York City’s Canal Street shortly after a conservative influencer tagged ICE in a post showing vendors in the area.

But now, with a powerful AI social media monitoring tool in the hands of ICE, the agency won’t need influencers to flag individuals for deportation — and it will only get riskier to speak freely on the internet.

“This is another example of Big Tech CEOs partnering with an increasingly authoritarian federal government as part of Trump’s ongoing attempts to clamp down on free speech,” Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, tells The Verge. “This should terrify and anger every American.”