Public records requests have shown that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement — who have continued and intensified Obama’s program of mass deportations and separation of families under Trump — uses Facebook’s logs, merged with logs from cellular carriers and analyzed by software from Palantir (Peter Thiel’s police-state arms-dealer) to track immigrants people they’re investigating.
Thiel also sits on Facebook’s Board of Directors.
Matthew Bourke, a spokesperson for ICE, emailed The Intercept to say the agency would not “comment on investigative techniques or tactics other than to say that during the course of a criminal investigation, we have the ability to seek subpoenas and court orders to legally compel a company to provide information that may assist in case completion and subsequent prosecution.”
“Court orders are an established procedure that is consistent with all other federal law enforcement agencies. Additionally, investigators can use open-source information that is readily available on various social-media platforms during the course of an investigation,” Bourke added.
…“For these subpoenas, it’s trivially easy for ICE or any other law enforcement agencies to issue,” explained Wessler. “They don’t require the involvement of a judge ahead of time. It’s really just a piece of paper that they’ve prepared ahead of time, a form, and they fill in a couple of pieces of information about what they’re looking for and they self-certify what they’re looking for is relevant to an ongoing investigation.”
ICE Uses Facebook Data to Find and Track Immigrants, Internal Emails Show [Lee Fang/The Intercept]