Kat Lonsdorf

It was a huge increase from their budget of previous years.

And a big part of what they've been using this money for is to scoop up surveillance technology and also sign tech contracts to do things with all of this data aggregation that Jude is talking about.

Well, we do know that ICE is using facial recognition technology and also location data, like Jude was talking about earlier, to find people and identify people that it potentially is seeking to deport.

But, you know, we're all subject to some level of this surveillance because ultimately, if it's being used on one of us, it's possibly being used on all of us, right?

Yeah.

I mean, and I will just say that this is just one more way that we've seen this administration push the boundaries of the law.

And then the courts have to go, you know, try to figure out where those boundaries are.

So we're just seeing a lot of these cases make it to the courts.

And then the courts are going to have to decide where the boundaries are around a lot of these laws.

I mean, that also is something we see happen regularly.

with technology, right?

Too, this is all a lot of new technology.

A lot of it, the law is playing catch up on.

And so a lot of these questions that we have about where the legality is, is something that's going to have to be figured out in a courtroom.

Yeah, we absolutely are, specifically on social media.

And we're seeing that play out a lot through something called administrative subpoenas, which DHS is sending to tech companies like Google or Meta, demanding personal information to unmask anonymous accounts, specifically anonymous accounts that are tracking ICE activity or are critical of ICE.

Administrative subpoenas can be issued by a federal agency like DHS without a judge or a grand jury.

They've typically been used with tech companies in the past involving serious offenses like child sexual abuse material.

But now privacy and civil rights experts say that we've seen a big uptick in them being sent to tech companies to threaten free speech.

We talked to Steve Loney, an attorney at the ACLU in Pennsylvania, who has represented several people who have been subpoenaed in this way in recent months.