Homeland: The Verge’s ongoing series about how government surveillance, bureaucracy, and technology have rewired American lives.

Nearly 20 years later, the Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest agencies in the federal government. It employs over a quarter-million people. Through shifting regimes, the DHS reflects changing priorities for what it considers threats against the “homeland”: some real (climate change, the pandemic), others imagined (activists, voter fraud).

Its 2022 budget is $52.2 billion — nearly three times what it was in 2002

A special series exploring two decades of American life under the Department of Homeland Security.

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The Verge’s “Homeland” project is a series of stories about surveillance, immigration, and technology that attempt to unmask the policies that have shaped the US in the 20 years since. For the next three months, we will be publishing investigative features, interviews, and profiles that will capture the breadth of DHS’s influence and power — and how that sprawl has diffused accountability and allowed the agency to operate in total opacity. . .

The great challenge of conceiving “Homeland” has not been identifying the myriad overreaches and abuses by the DHS but trying to understand the long trail of incentives and violations it has caused. Often, the reasons were unintentional. But repeatedly, the reporting comes to the same conclusion: that the Department of Homeland Security has been a 20-year boondoggle.

— Sarah Jeong and Kevin Nguyen, Editors

"When George W. Bush outlined his national strategy for homeland security, the pitch was simple: America was under attack by a “terrorist threat,” and the country needed to protect itself from an enemy that “takes many forms, has many places to hide, and is often invisible.”

It was in direct response to the 9/11 attack, and yet, the specifics of that terrorist threat were surprisingly vague. The imprecision could be read as paranoia. Or, more insidiously, you could see it as a way to broaden the definition of enemy to include any and all foreigners. Suddenly, immigrants were a threat to the “homeland.” And anyone else who would voice a dissenting opinion was a danger to national security. Rereading the strategic initiatives that underpin the Department of Homeland Security’s founding today, an irony in its logic becomes clear: the threat is there, and also, the threat is here.

And so, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was swiftly established as a new umbrella agency to oversee nearly two dozen existing ones. Domestically, the government’s great response to 9/11 would come to resemble a dramatic corporate reshuffling to keep Americans safe by updating an org chart. Whereas the US enforces its power abroad through military and economic strength, it enacts violence on its people domestically through a much more surreptitious form: bureaucracy. . .

Just as 9/11 gave the US government cover to start two wars abroad, it became the justification to permanently undermine the civil rights of its people — an undermining of civil freedoms disguised as a big knee-jerk reaction. . ."

CONTINUE >> https://www.theverge.com/c/23055922/homeland-security-series 

Photos: Marissa Leshnov

6.29.22	The Afghan refugee crisis collides with California’s housing disaster

    

The largest population of Afghans in the US is in the Bay area, which makes it the most sought-after place for relocation for displaced refugees. It also happens to be the place with America’s worst housing crisis.

> In 2019, Donald Trump named his acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Then a federal court realized his appointment was completely unlawful.

>

How the TSA created| two classes of travelers

By: Nilay Patel	Illustration: Kristen Radtke	Animation: Grayson Blackmon

6.29.22	Airport surveillance, security lines, and what we surrender when we sign up for PreCheck

Nilay Patel speaks with the TSA’s chief innovation officer, Dan McCoy, about airport surveillance, security lines, and what we surrender when we sign up for PreCheck

Nobody enjoys waiting in the airport security line. But you can make that wait a little bit shorter — and also keep your shoes on — if you pay for a program rolled out by the TSA called “PreCheck.” In a post-9/11 world, this is the great innovation of the department.

At least according to Dan McCoy. This is a guy who should know innovation, as the TSA’s chief innovation officer. In my interview with him, he called PreCheck ---- “a hallmark government innovation program.”

But what do programs like PreCheck and the larger surveillance apparatus that theoretically keep us safe mean for the choices we make? What do we give up to get into the shorter security line, and how comfortable should we be with that?

BLOGGER NOTE: Dan McCoy also mentions "Clear"... here's what that is ICE Signs $274,000 Contract With Clearview

Shitbirds Of A Feather Flock Together:

ICE Signs $274,000 Contract With Clearview

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the voted-Most-Hateable-for-two-years-running! dept

Tue, Aug 18th 2020 12:03pm — Tim Cushing

"ICE continues to not care what anyone thinks of it. Its tactics over the past few years have turned it into one of the federal government's most infamous monsters, thanks to its separation of families, caging of children, unfettered surveillance of undocumented immigrants, its fake university sting created to punish students trying to remain in the country legally, its sudden rescinding of COVID-related distance learning guidelines solely for the purpose of punishing students trying to remain in the country legally… well, you get the picture.
Perhaps it's fitting ICE is buying tech from a company that appears unconcerned that most of the public hates it. Clearview -- the facial recognition software that matches uploaded facial images with billions of images scraped from the open web -- is one of the latest additions to ICE's surveillance tech arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with facial recognition company Clearview AI this week for “mission support,” government contracting records show (as first spotted by the tech accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry). The purchase order for $224,000 describes “clearview licenses” and lists “ICE mission support dallas” as the contracting office. . .

Either way, we can safely conclude both partners here suck. ICE is bad and keeps getting worse, and Clearview isn't ever going to improve and is presumably still scraping sites for "content" it can sell to its customers.

Filed Under: dhs, facial recognition, for the children, hsi, ics, surveillance
Companies: clearview, clearview ai

26 June 2021

Clearview In View (One More Time Again!) on Techdirt Over "Scraping"

"Clearview continues to dominate the "Most Hated" category in the facial recognition tech games. And with Amazon tossing aside its "Rekognition" program for the time being (it's spelled with a K because the AI tried to spell "recognition" correctly and failed), Clearview has opened up what could be an insurmountable lead.

Clearview Forbids Users From Scraping Its Database Of Images It Scraped From Thousands Of Websites

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the don't-scrape-me-bro dept

Fri, Jun 25th 2021 3:34pm — Tim Cushing 

 

. . .Clearview has been sued, investigated, banned by law enforcement agencies, and suffered numerous self-inflicted wounds.

Underneath Clearview's untried and untested AI lies an underbedding composed of the internet. The ~4 billion images in Clearview's database have been scraped from public posts and accounts hosted by thousands of websites and dozens of social media platforms.

There's nothing inherently wrong with scraping sites to make use of information hosted there. In fact, this often controversial power can sometimes be used for good.

The last thing we need is Clearview's questionable tech convincing legislators, prosecutors, and courts that scraping sites is something only criminals do.

Clearview called out Google's apparent hypocrisy on the subject of site scraping when Google sent a cease-and-desist demanding it stop harvesting images and data from Google's online possessions. But Clearview is apparently unable to recognize its own hypocrisy. While it's cool with site scraping when it can benefit from it, it frowns upon others perpetrating this "harm" on its own databases. . .

Its user agreement [PDF] with the Evansville, Indiana police department (obtained by MuckRock user J Ader) contains this paragraph:

 

The use of automated systems or software to extract the whole or any part of the Service or Website, the Information or data on or within the Service or the Website, including image search results or source code, for any purposes (including uses commonly known as “scraping”) is strictly prohibited.

Pretty sure a bunch of the sites scraped by Clearview have similar clauses in their terms of use. And if Clearview doesn't believe those terms should be honored, it shouldn't expect others to give it the respect it refuses to extend to others. I don't think anyone else should necessarily be in possession of everything in Clearview's facial recognition database but I do think someone needs to scrape the shit out of it on sheer principle. . ."