Photo via U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - Getty Images
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents
Mass surveillance always expands past the use it is originally adopted for. China, Russia, England, Israel, the U.S.—the list goes on. I think we can all agree that the level of daily surveillance Americans are subjected to today would have been unfathomable to us just a decade ago, and it is only getting worse.
In June, I wrote about the gross misuse of facial recognition technology here – how the secret algorithms lead to all-too-common misidentifications, and how law enforcement’s reliance on third party companies to store and process data is inherently a security risk.
In short, flagrant misuse of FRT across the country, plus demonstrably racist algorithms that chronically misidentify Black and Asian faces, is a terrible investment for our city and opens us up to abuses, lawsuits, and wasted taxpayer money.
This month, I have a very clear warning.
ICE will use the Milwaukee Police Department's surveillance and intel, whether they like it or not.
There are three strong reasons why this is evident.
- ICE, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) already have access to most law enforcement data, records, and resources—explicitly and sneakily.
- The federal government is already taking and doing what they want, laws and precedent be damned.
- Law enforcement officers—like every other human—break the law and do things deceitfully—like trade information like favors “among friends.”
The stories in most of these countries and cities start the same way:
“We need to track all of your cars for safety”
“This shiny new technology will help us prevent this most recent terrible thing you just saw on the news from happening again”
“This new technology is a force multiplier and will help our brave officers save time and money” “We’re only doing this in the most extreme of dangerous circumstances to stop the most violent of people from doing the worst things”
And then, in a year, maybe two? It’s everywhere.
They Already Take or Buy What They Want
ICE currently has agreements allowing them to search and receive data from many different law enforcement databases, including license plate information and other records, and they creepily have access to Medicaid enrollment data and unprecedented access to IRS data. We just saw in Westchester, New York, that ICE and the DHS, Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Secret Service, and the FBI all have access to the local law
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enforcement’s databases and can see the information from their License Plate Readers, Flock cameras, photos, video and anything else that local law enforcement stores.
Now we already knew that local police were performing lookups for ICE, but on August 25, 404 Media revealed that “Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regularly searched more than 80,000 Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras”—and it appeared that the police departments didn’t even know they were sharing data with CBP.
Just this week we learned that cops from Georgia, Texas, Illinois and Massachusetts were part of 1.6 million searches of the San Francisco Police Department’s Flock cameras – most likely disregarding local and state guidelines established to prevent this very threat.
You read that correctly—one million six hundred thousand times SFPD’s camera systems were accessed by other states’ departments—often for helping ICE. In fact, ICE can access almost every city’s Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) databases.
In 2018, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center exposed how ICE contracts with a company called Thomson Reuters to gain access to ALPR information from Motorola’s Vigilant’s LEARN (Law Enforcement Archival Network) database. Thomson Reuters provides the platform (known as CLEAR), which provides all sorts of resources, including real time search of public records, alerts, data, and AI analysis. If the Milwaukee Police Department uses Motorola or similar products, we can be fairly certain that these records have been sold or traded and are searchable in real time.
ICE also has arrangements through SCAAP (The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program). This program creates a perverse incentive for Wisconsin law enforcement agencies to share information with ICE—and they do. This program partially reimburses state and local governments for the costs of incarcerating certain non-citizens. In exchange for these funds, agencies submit data to ICE on individuals they have incarcerated who are believed to be undocumented. There are currently 29 counties in Wisconsin that participate in SCAAP.
Wisconsin Fusion Centers
This brings us to Wisconsin’s Fusion Centers and the nearly unfettered access that ICE has to all of our state’s law enforcement information.
A fusion center is a collaborative effort between multiple government agencies and private partners to gather and share intelligence and information in one central hub. Wisconsin has two fusion centers – one in Milwaukee and one in Madison. The fusion center in Madison is called the Wisconsin Statewide Intelligence Center (WSIC) and the one in Milwaukee is called the Southeastern Wisconsin Threat Analysis Center (STAC). The Milwaukee fusion center is located at 749 W State St, right across the street from the MATC Bookstore, and next to the Municipal Court.
Although some police departments have their own smaller fusion centers, such as the Milwaukee Police Department’s Intelligence Fusion Center, it’s based in the same place as our state fusion center. Very convenient.
The two statewide fusion centers are operated by the Wisconsin Department of Justice-Division of Criminal Investigation. They provide centers for pooling federal, state and local intelligence. According to the WSIC website, they serve as the “primary focal point for threat information sharing among federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement, emergency management, fire service, public health, corrections, military, and private sector partners for the state.” The one in Milwaukee handles the Southeast portion of Wisconsin, and the one in Madison handles the rest of the state.
Fusion centers access information from various databases, some of which come from private sector partners. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI support fusion centers by sharing data and providing connectivity to federal systems.
For example, DHS’ Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), their central biometric repository, which contains millions of identities is accessible there. The newer Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) system, a program with an even greater scope for collecting biometric records is also accessible there.
This means that in addition to the federal information, all of the MPD information, including data gathered from ShotSpotter (audio and camera systems set up around the city); Virtual Investigations Unit (VIU) which scours social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok; cell site simulators (CSS) that give police the ability to track cell phones and even intercept texts and phone calls; and FUSUS (owned by Axon which also makes MPD bodycams and car cams) which lets police access privately owned security camera footage from residents and businesses, is stored there as well.
Now what happens when the Milwaukee Police Department formally integrates Facial Recognition Technology into their toolbox? Given what is happening nationally and locally, does all of this information conveniently located in one hub make you feel safe? Me neither.
ICE Loves Facial Recognition Technology
Worse still, there is little to no public or private oversight of these centers.
In November 2024, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) reported that, “fusion centers enable ICE to coopt local police databases and surveillance tools (like facial recognition) that otherwise couldn’t be used for deportation purposes. Fusion center participants routinely give ICE sensitive data, violating state and local protections for undocumented immigrants. Local police officers use fusion centers to encourage ICE to target suspects when officers can’t find enough evidence to bring charges, effectively deporting their cold cases. Fusion centers’ opacity allows them to routinely violate state and local civil rights laws without consequence.”
This is a terrifying and Kafkaesque realization. It is chilling. It is downright cold-war soviet in its implications. And it appears to be happening right now.
On top of what is laying about at the Fusion Centers, ICE has their own incredible tech tools and connections to powerful military contractors. As of last month, ICE contracts with BI2 Technologies for IRIS (Inmate Recognition and Identification System) biometric systems, and MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition & Information).
The second program, MORIS, is an app available on Apple, Microsoft, and Android devices that accompanies the IRIS program. It allows law enforcement to authenticate an individual's identity and immediately have access to any information and data previously entered into the IRIS national database. Who doesn’t love a quick eyeball scan?
ICE currently uses Clearview AI for Facial Recognition Technology. Clearview is used by law enforcement across the nation, although not yet with Milwaukee’s Police Department (although MPD conveniently took advantage of a “free trial” years ago to do many searches). As a matter of fact, Clearview AI is very restricted in Illinois due to previous privacy violations. We can assume that any FRT data put in our city and state systems will be shared with ICE’s systems, like Palantir Technologies, which is a frequent ICE contractor. Palantir, a private company, has developed systems which integrate with federal biometric databases for tracking immigrants—another reason why they would want access to MPD’s biometric libraries. ICE agents collect biometrics like fingerprints, iris and facial images in the field to check against DHS databases and would love to check them against local databases too. And yes, a palantir IS the powerful magic seeing stone that was usurped by the forces of evil in The Lord of the Rings. The irony hurts.
ICE also contracts with NEC, another private firm, for fingerprint and other biometric capture devices, and with Cellebrite for mobile forensics tools that extract data from smartphones and other devices. (Cellebrite is like a more expensive version of GrayKey, which the MPD uses for hacking cellphones.) That means all of the data on your phone—contacts, photos, text messages, passwords, and your cloud data can be accessed once your phone is confiscated, and they can download all of it in under an hour.
ICE has access to all of it—and frankly, anything we put in the fusion centers. If our federal government is already sharing our Social Security and Medicaid records with ICE, why would we be foolish enough to believe they don’t have unfettered access to everything else as well? With the passage of the Reconciliation Bill in July, Congress approved $170 billion for “Border & Immigration.” That’s the largest expenditure ever for this. That’s more than most nations’ defense budgets and it's being deployed domestically.
Why should Milwaukeeans invite increased surveillance and further help an organization that is already perpetrating unlawful detentions of people in our country? Cities across the U.S. are outraged at unidentified masked men cosplaying as police officers and capturing parents at schools, pulling screaming people from stores, and marching through the streets like it’s a scene from Call of Duty: Operation Backyard BBQ. It’s not like ICE cares about due process or common decency.
Allowing the expansion of law enforcement surveillance technology, including MPD use of Facial Recognition Technology, and expecting ICE not to gain access to this data, is naive. The Milwaukee Police Department talks about setting up “guard rails” to prevent the misuse of FRT by bad actors. We have seen this month that those don’t work.
Many of us who have lived in Milwaukee for years already have lost faith in these hypothetical systems. Juwon Madlock—a 10-year veteran of the MPD—fed information, his comrades' identities, photos, license plates,and weapons to a local gang. Multiple officers were indicted and lost their jobs due to a federal investigation into illegal body cavity and strip searches they conducted on civilians for years. MPD officers, like Gregory Carson Jr.—already on the Brady/Giglio list for having problems with credibility, integrity, and bias—was exposed on national television recently for lying under oath yet again last month. These officers ruin the reputation of the MPD and jeopardize our safety. We do not need to give the MPD dangerous tools like FRT at the same time we have officers like union president Alex Ayala calling for the National Guard to be deployed in Milwaukee. It’s painfully clear that the federal government will pick up whatever is stored anywhere for any reason they deem fit.
As overwhelming as this seems, our course of action is clear.
Mass surveillance always expands past the use it is adopted for. We must not let local law enforcement feed into the unlawful ICE deportation machine. We must at least call our Ccty’s elected officials and tell them to prevent the MPD from using facial recognition technology (FRT) to keep families together and maintain some semblance of privacy, freedom and democracy. It’s no longer about local control—it’s about federal government overreach and abuse. The stakes are too high at this moment in history to give ICE any more ammo.
