From: https://tinyurl.com/cm7y7hpp (theintercept.com)

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LexisNexis Is Selling Your Personal Data to ICE So It Can Try to Predict Crimes

ICE uses LexisNexis to track cars, gather information on people, and make
arrests for its deportation machine, according to a contract.

Sam Biddle
June 20 2023, 4:33 p.m.

The legal research and public records data broker LexisNexis is providing
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with tools to target people who
may potentially commit a crime - before any actual crime takes place,
according to a contract document obtained by The Intercept. LexisNexis
then allows ICE to track the purported pre-criminals' movements.

The unredacted contract overview provides a rare look at the controversial
$16.8 million agreement between LexisNexis and ICE, a federal law
enforcement agency whose surveillance of and raids against migrant
communities are widely criticized as brutal, unconstitutional, and
inhumane.

"The purpose of this program is mass surveillance at its core."

"The purpose of this program is mass surveillance at its core," said Julie
Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, which is suing
LexisNexis over allegations it illegally buys and sells personal data. Mao
told The Intercept the ICE contract document, which she reviewed for The
Intercept, is "an admission and indication that ICE aims to surveil
individuals where no crime has been committed and no criminal warrant or
evidence of probable cause."

While the company has previously refused to answer any questions about
precisely what data it's selling to ICE or to what end, the contract
overview describes LexisNexis software as not simply a giant bucket of
personal data, but also a sophisticated analytical machine that purports
to detect suspicious activity and scrutinize migrants - including their
locations.

"This is really concerning," Emily Tucker, the executive director of
Georgetown Law School's Center on Privacy and Technology, told The
Intercept. Tucker compared the LexisNexis contract to controversial and
frequently biased predictive policing software, causing heightened alarm
thanks to ICE's use of license plate databases. "Imagine if whenever a cop
used PredPol to generate a `hot list' the software also generated a map of
the most recent movements of any vehicle associated with each person on
the hot list."

The document, a "performance of work statement" made by LexisNexis as part
of its contract with ICE, was obtained by journalist Asher Stockler
through a public records request and shared with The Intercept. LexisNexis
Risk Solutions, a subsidiary of LexisNexis's parent company, inked the
contract with ICE, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, in 2021.

"LexisNexis Risk Solutions prides itself on the responsible use of data,
and the contract with the Department of Homeland Security encompasses only
data allowed for such uses," said LexisNexis spokesperson Jennifer
Richman. She told The Intercept the company's work with ICE doesn't
violate the law or federal policy, but did not respond to specific
questions.

The document reveals that over 11,000 ICE officials, including within the
explicitly deportation-oriented Enforcement and Removal Operations branch,
were using LexisNexis as of 2021. "This includes supporting all aspects of
ICE screening and vetting, lead development, and criminal analysis
activities," the document says.

In practice, this means ICE is using software to "automate" the hunt for
suspicious-looking blips in the data, or links between people, places, and
property. It is unclear how such blips in the data can be linked to
immigration infractions or criminal activity, but the contract's use of
the term "automate" indicates that ICE is to some extent letting computers
make consequential conclusions about human activity. The contract further
notes that the LexisNexis analysis includes "identifying potentially
criminal and fraudulent behavior before crime and fraud can materialize."
(ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

LexisNexis supports ICE's activities through a widely used data system
named the Law Enforcement Investigative Database Subscription. The
contract document provides the most comprehensive window yet for what data
tools might be offered to a LEIDS clients. Other federal, state, and local
authorities who pay a hefty subscription fee for the LexisNexis program
could have access to the same powerful surveillance tools used by ICE.

The LEIDS program is used by ICE for "the full spectrum of its immigration
enforcement," according to the contract document. LexisNexis's tools allow
ICE to monitor the personal lives and mundane movements of migrants in the
U.S., in search of incriminating "patterns" and for help to "strategize
arrests."

The ICE contract makes clear the extent to which LexisNexis isn't simply a
resource to be queried but a major power source for the American
deportation machine.

LexisNexis is known for its vast trove of public records and commercial
data, a constantly updating archive that includes information ranging from
boating licenses and DMV filings to voter registrations and cellphone
subscriber rolls. In the aggregate, these data points create a vivid
mosaic of a person's entire life, interests, professional activities,
criminal run-ins no matter how minor, and far more.

While some of the data is valuable for the likes of researchers,
journalists, and law students, LexisNexis has turned the mammoth pool of
personal data into a lucrative revenue stream by selling it to law
enforcement clients like ICE, who use the company's many data points on
over 280 million different people to not only determine whether someone
constitutes a "risk," but also to locate and apprehend them.

LexisNexis has long since deflected questions about its relationship by
citing ICE's "national security" and "public safety" mission; the agency
is responsible for both criminal and civil immigration violations,
including smuggling, other trafficking, and customs violations. The
contract's language, however, indicates LexisNexis is empowering ICE to
sift through an large sea of personal data to do exactly what advocates
have warned against: busting migrants for civil immigration violations, a
far cry from thwarting terrorists and transnational drug cartels.

ICE Searched LexisNexis Database Over 1 Million Times in Just Seven Months

ICE has a documented history of rounding up and deporting nonviolent
immigrants without any criminal history, whose only offense may be
something on the magnitude of a traffic violation or civil immigration
violation. The contract document further suggests LexisNexis is
facilitating ICE's workplace raids, one of the agency's most frequently
criticized practices, by helping immigration officials detect fraud
through bulk searches of Social Security and phone numbers.

ICE investigators can use LexisNexis tools, the document says, to pull a
large quantity of records about a specified individual's life and visually
map their relationships to other people and property. The practice stands
as an exemplar of the digital surveillance sprawl that immigrant advocates
have warned unduly broadens the gaze of federal suspicion onto masses of
people.

Citing language from the contract, Mao, the lawyer on the lawsuit, said,
"`Patterns of relationships between entities' likely means family members,
one of the fears for immigrants and mixed status families is that
LexisNexis and other data broker platforms can map out family
relationships to identify, locate, and arrest undocumented individuals."

The contract shows ICE can combine LexisNexis data with databases from
other outside firms, namely PenLink, a controversial company that helps
police nationwide request private user data from social media companies.

In this Wednesday, April 29, 2020 photo, a surveillance camera, top right,
and license plate scanners, center, are seen at an intersection in West
Baltimore. On Friday, May 1, planes equipped with cameras will begin
creating a continuous visual record of the city of Baltimore so that
police can see how potential suspects and witnesses moved to and from
crime scenes. Police alerted to violent crimes by street-level cameras and
gunfire sound detectors will work with analysts to see just where people
came and went.

The contract's "performance of work statement" mostly avoids delving into
the numerous categories of data LexisNexis makes available to ICE, but it
does make clear the importance of one: license plates.

The automatic scanning of license plates has created a feast for
data-hungry government agencies, providing an effective means of tracking
people. Many people are unaware that their license plates are continuously
scanned as they drive throughout their communities and beyond - thanks to
automated systems affixed to traffic lights, cop cars, and anywhere else a
small camera might fit. These automated license plate reader systems, or
ALPRs, are employed by an increasingly diverse range of
surveillance-seekers, from toll booths to homeowners associations.

Police are a major consumer of the ALPR spigot. For them, tracking the
humble license plate is a relatively cheap means of covertly tracking a
person's movements while - as with all the data offered by LexisNexis -
potentially bypassing Fourth Amendment considerations. The trade in bulk
license plate data is generally unregulated, and information about scanned
plates is indiscriminately aggregated, stored, shared, and eventually sold
through companies like LexisNexis.

A major portion of the LexisNexis overview document details ICE's access
to and myriad use of license plate reader data to geolocate its targets,
providing the agency with 30 million new plate records monthly. The
document says ICE can access data on any license plate query going back
years; while the time frame for different kinds of investigations aren't
specified, the contract document says immigration investigations can query
location and other data on a license plate going back five years.

"This begins to look a lot like indiscriminate, warrantless real-time
surveillance capabilities for ICE with respect to any vehicle."

The LexisNexis license plate bounty provides ICE investigators with a
variety of location-tracking surveillance techniques, including the
ability to learn which license plates - presumably including people under
no suspicion of any wrongdoing - have appeared in a location of interest.
Users subscribing to LexisNexis's LEIDS program can also plug a plate into
the system, and LexisNexis will automatically share updates on the car as
they come in, including maps and vehicle images. ICE investigators are
allowed to place up to 2,500 different license plates onto their own
watchlist simultaneously, the contract notes.

ICE agents can also bring the LexisNexis car-tracking tech on the road
through a dedicated smartphone app that allows them to, with only a few
taps, snap a picture of someone's plate to automatically place them on the
watchlist. Once a plate of interest is snapped and uploaded, ICE agents
then need only to wait for a convenient push notification informing them
that there's been activity detected about the car.

How ICE Uses Social Media to Surveil and Arrest Immigrants

Combining the staggering number of plates with the ability to search them
from anywhere provides a potent tool with little oversight, according to
Tucker, of Georgetown Law.

Tucker told The Intercept, "This begins to look a lot like indiscriminate,
warrantless real-time surveillance capabilities for ICE with respect to
any vehicle encountered by any agent in any context."

LexisNexis's LEIDS program is, crucially, not an outlier in the United
States. For-profit data brokers are increasingly tapped by law enforcement
and intelligence agencies for both the vastness of the personal
information they collect and the fact that this data can be simply
purchased rather than legally obtained with a judge's approval.

"Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even
fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone,"
warned a recently declassified report from the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence on so-called commercially available information.
Specifically citing LexisNexis, the report said the breadth of the
information "could be used to cause harm to an individual's reputation,
emotional well-being, or physical safety."

While the ICE contract document is replete with mentions of how these
tools will be used to thwart criminality - obscuring the extent to which
this the ends up deporting noncriminal migrants guilty of breaking only
civil immigration rules - Tucker said the public should take seriously the
inflated ambitions of ICE's parent agency, the Department of Homeland
Security.

"What has happened in the last several years is that DHS's `immigration
enforcement' activities have been subordinated to its mass surveillance
activities," Tucker said, "which produce opportunities for immigration
enforcement but no longer have the primary purpose of immigration
enforcement."

"What has happened in the last several years is that DHS's `immigration
enforcement' activities have been subordinated to its mass surveillance
activities."

The federal government allows the general Homeland Security apparatus so
much legal latitude, Tucker explained, that an agency like ICE is the
perfect vehicle for indiscriminate surveillance of the general public,
regardless of immigration status.

"That's not to say that DHS isn't still detaining and deporting hundreds
of thousands of people every year. Of course they are, and it's horrific,"
Tucker said. "But the main goal of DHS's surveillance infrastructure is
not immigration enforcement, it's ... surveillance.

"Use the agency that operates with the fewest legal and political
restraints to put everyone inside a digital panopticon, and then figure
out who to target for what kind of enforcement later, depending on the
needs of the moment."
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... I hear the word "icy" is easy to spell. Looking at it, now I see why.
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