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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And we also have NPR reporters Kat Lansdorff and Jude Joffe Block joining us today. How do you both? Hey. Hey.
So today on the show, we're going to be talking about how the Department of Homeland Security is surveilling people in new ways, because you both, along with NPR's Meg Anderson, have been digging into a bunch of different tools that DHS is using to track both people who are in the United States illegally, but also U.S. citizens.
And I want to start with this example of this woman in Minneapolis named Emily, who your story kind of opens with as well. Kat, tell us about who she is and what her experience kind of shows.
Yeah, so Emily's experience was back in late January. She was out driving around her neighborhood in Minneapolis patrolling for ICE as a constitutional observer. I'll just say we're only IDing Emily by her first name because she fears retribution from the federal government.
She told me she was following an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot when a masked agent leaned out the window, took a picture of her and her license plate, and then – rolled down the window and addressed Emily by name and recited her home address to her. You know, Emily told us that it really shook her. Their message was not subtle, right?
They were, in effect, saying, we see you, we can get to you whenever we want to. And it did scare me. Emily says she didn't know how they pulled up her information so quickly.
And that was one of the things we were really trying to figure out with this reporting was... You know, we were collecting dozens of stories, talking to people, combing through court documents to really try to understand how is this surveillance web that DHS is spinning affecting real people on the ground?
OK, so, I mean, tell me more about what you're reporting found out specifically in Emily's case. I mean, how was the government? Do you have any sense of how the government was able to get this information on her?
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Chapter 2: What new surveillance tactics is DHS using on American citizens?
And she recorded this video.
Exactly. Yeah. That's what we're doing. Yeah. Why are you taking my information down? Because we have a nice little database. Oh, good. And now you're considered a domestic terrorist.
We're videotaping you?
So you can hear there they tell her that they have a, quote, nice little database and that they are considering her a domestic terrorist. I will say that DHS has denied having a database like this several times since that video went pretty viral. Outgoing Secretary Kristi Noem denied it in front of Congress just last week.
Todd Lyons, who's the acting director for ICE, has also denied it in front of Congress. DHS also denied it to us in a statement that that we got from them. You know, we did ask DHS why agents are taking pictures of protesters faces or license plates, and they did not respond to that question when we asked them. So, you know, we don't know if there is a database like this, despite them denying it.
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Chapter 3: Who is Emily and what does her story reveal about ICE surveillance?
You know, it could be that, you know, these are semantics. Maybe a contractor has a database. Maybe it's not technically a database. These are still things that we don't know.
What is clear is that the federal government, and you and I have reported on this a lot too, is working really hard to consolidate data in new ways and is acquiring data in new ways. And I guess I want to dig into that a little bit. Do we have any sense of why that is happening more now than it was maybe a year or two ago?
Yeah, as you said, the two of us have reported on this in the voting context, but we've seen lots of other examples of cross-agency data sharing. And actually, some of these are agreements with ICE. So, for example, there's... records from Medicaid that a federal judge has now approved because it was challenged in court to be shared with ICE that include address information.
You know, one technology that ICE agents have access to is a cell phone app called Elite. It's made by Palantir, which is a company that does a lot in the tech space. It has a lot of government contracts.
And this app and it was described by an ICE agent in court testimony as looking kind of like Google Maps and showing data points of places where people who could be deported by ICE live and like the likelihood that they live at that address. And it pulls from a lot of different data streams. And Palantir has acknowledged that some of that data includes data from other federal agencies.
And we think that that includes those Medicaid records, for example. So this is something that we're now starting to see a little bit more how some of these data sharing and consolidation efforts that are happening on the federal level are now trickling down to ICE agents in the field to be able to locate people they want to deport.
I mean, I will say, you know, surveillance under DHS is not a new thing, right? That is a big part of what the Department of Homeland Security does. But, you know, especially under this administration, especially in Trump's second administration, ICE's budget has ballooned. You know, part of the one big, beautiful bill act that was passed by Congress last year.
gave ICE something like an $80 billion budget. 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.
Figuring out what that money is being spent on, it sounds like you guys are basically kind of piecing this together from public records and from talking to people. But is there any actual kind of government transparency about how that money is being spent?
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Chapter 4: How does DHS collect information on individuals like Emily?
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.
All right. Well, I want to dig into also how this is impacting free speech as well. But we'll get into that after a quick break.
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And we're back. And we've been talking about all these new novel ways that the Department of Homeland Security is surveilling people. We've been focusing at this point on people being surveilled out in the world. But I'm curious, Kat, on if we're also seeing new tactics play out, tracking people's lives online.
Yeah.
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. And he told us that a pattern is starting to emerge.
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