Ice driver license facial recognition full#
Ice driver license facial recognition license#

Ice driver license facial recognition license#

The documents, obtained through public records requests by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology and first reported on by The Washington Post, mark the first known instance of ICE using facial recognition technology to scan state driver’s license databases, including photos of legal residents and citizens. In Vermont, agents only had to file a paper request that was later approved by Department of Motor Vehicles employees. In the third state, Washington, agents authorized administrative subpoenas of the Department of Licensing to conduct a facial recognition scan of all photos of license applicants, though it was unclear whether the state carried out the searches. At least two of those states, Utah and Vermont, complied, searching their photos for matches, those records show. In at least three states that offer driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, ICE officials have requested to comb through state repositories of license photos, according to newly released documents. 'The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state DMVs.WASHINGTON - Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have mined state driver’s license databases using facial recognition technology, analyzing millions of motorists’ photos without their knowledge.

'People think this is something coming way off in the future, but these searches are happening very frequently today,' Laperruque added. “It is really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system,' a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight the Post, Jake Laperruque warned, as Congress has not approved any these methods.

Some of these states have allowed the federal agencies in question to mine driver’s licenses, whereas others, such as Florida and New York are still negotiating over access to the data.

Ice driver license facial recognition full#

More than a dozen states allow undocumented people to drive with full licenses or driving privilege cards, including New York, Florida, and Texas, among others. It was reported that ICE and the FBI carried out facial recognition searches in the states of Utah, Vermont, and Washington, which grant undocumented migrants the permission to have driver licenses. Your friends' tweeted the non-profit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES). 'Besides targeting undocumented folks, ICE is running facial recognition searches against millions of photos. Privacy advocates and Human Rights groups have responded with great worry over the news, which come at a time where members of Congress including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are expressing increasing concerns over the threats represented by facial recognition technology on privacy and civil liberties. 'Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents, and emails over the past five years, reveal that federal investigators have turned state departments of motor vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure,' the Washington Post reporting on the records on Sunday.

The United States (U.S.) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have used facial recognition technology to analyze millions of driver's license databases without any permission in order to get information to hunt migrants, according to documents obtained by privacy experts at the Georgetown University Law Center.ĭecorated US-Born Marine Veteran Wrongfully Detained By ICE For Deportation