Three
years ago, the center revealed that nearly half of all U.S.
adults are already in the FBI’s facial-recognition database, which is largely
sourced from DMV photos. The documents uncovered this week are the first
confirmation that states have granted ICE specifically, not just the FBI,
access to those databases.
Vermont
and Utah both complied with ICE’s request, The New York Times reported; in
Washington, it’s unclear whether the searches ever actually happened after
being authorized.
The
implications for undocumented migrants are stark: Utah, Washington, and
Vermont are among the 12 states that don’t require documentation
to obtain a driver’s license. What may have seemed like an olive
branch to allow easier access to driving and identification now could be an
invitation for investigation, arrest, or deportation.
“The
purpose of driver’s licenses is to keep people safe, not to enable ICE to
terrorize immigrant communities,” says Jake Snow, a technology and civil
liberties attorney at the ACLU. “Neither Congress nor the states have ever legislatively
authorized this conduct.”
But the
surveillance apparatus is remarkable precisely because it doesn’t just ensnare
those who have broken the law. When state officials hand over access to public
databases with drivers’ photos or license-plate images, they aren’t just
relinquishing the information of guilty parties. The vast majority of
American adults have driver’s licenses. These scans will include an
overwhelming number of drivers who have never been accused of a crime. DMV
information essentially offers law enforcement the unchecked ability to search
without a warrant. In effect, these license databases have become criminal
databases, each search justified by the chance that someone documented there
is guilty of crime. Everyone in them has become a suspect.
And
though this is the first news of ICE using driver’s license photos for facial
recognition, the agency already has plenty of access to public information via
other means. For example, Vigilant Solutions, which maintains the country’s
largest database of license plate photos, contracts with ICE,
allowing agents to query a license plate and receive a log of everywhere it’s
been spotted by license-plate-reading cameras. Vigilant also used its cameras
to gather data from California malls, an action it initially denied until
its parent company, Motorola, admitted that
allegations were true.
All
told, we are barreling toward a future where every ritual of public life
carries implicit consent to be surveilled: obtaining a license, driving a car,
shopping in the mall, and even walking across a college
campus or city block all open one up to tracking and database
matching of some kind. Opting out would mean nonparticipation in social life—a
consequence much more dire than the invasion of privacy. When participating in
daily life means being searched, law enforcement ceases to presume that the
public is innocent.
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