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."
===

... I hear the word "icy" is easy to spell.  Looking at it, now I see why.
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