With around $106 million obligated over the course of the contract, CACI provided ICE and its Homeland Security Investigations team with a “continuous monitoring and alert service” that supplied real-time data from “various” and “available” sources, including the “deep web,” according to the contract. The system was required to be able to keep tabs on 1 million individuals, enabling ICE and HSI to “proactively scrutinize known or suspected crime.”
[…]
“The federal government has worked with private technology companies for a long time to build sophisticated surveillance systems,” said Daniel McGrath, special counsel for oversight at Democracy Forward. “The Trump administration is now weaponizing these systems to intimidate immigrants, silence protestors, and interfere in elections.”
Emphasis mine.
Privacy and civil liberties advocates told FedScoop that a system as massive as the one DHS is going to be working on with Thomson Reuters sounds a number of alarm bells.
One concern raised by experts is around the predictive element of DHS’s goals for the system.
“What most of the available research tells us is that you can’t anywhere near consistently predict who is going to turn into a criminal,” said Patrick Eddington, senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute. “And any kind of software or AI that essentially encourages the fictitious belief that you can do that is a prescription for constitutional rights violations at scale — I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”