Last week, how ICE As raids became more frequent in New York, city residents began to fight back in the best ways they had: confronting agents on the sidewalks, haranguing them as they canvassed the blocks, and recording them with camera phones held up in the air. Ruthless documentation has proven to be somewhat of an effective tool against President Donald Trump's expansion of powers ICE; agents began wearing masks for fear of exposure, and the circulation of images showing armed police and mobilized National Guard troops in quiet cities underscored the brutal absurdity of their activities. Activist memes were minted on social media: a woman on Canal Street in New York, dressed in a polka-dot office casual dress, flips ICE agents are disabled; a man in Washington, D.C., throws a Subway sandwich at a federal agent in August. Recent “No Kings” marches were filled with protesters wearing inflatable frog suits, inspired by a man wearing the same outfit who was pepper sprayed while protesting outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, Oregon. Some may chalk these memes up to resistance porn, but digital content at least serves as a living defense mechanism in the absence of functional politics.
At the same time, social media has become an active source of transparency in recent weeks, harkening back to the days when Twitter became an organizing tool during the Arab Spring in the early twenties, or when Facebook and Instagram helped spark the Black Lives Matter marches in 2020. However, the mass optimism of that early social media era is long gone, replaced by a sense of posting as a last resort. After Trump authorized the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago Earlier this month, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker advised residents to “write down and share what you see—post it on social media.” But if anti-MAGA the opposition uses the Internet, ICE and so does the Trump administration. Right-wing writers use the same channels to identify and publicize the targets of the raids. According to Semafor, Trump-friendly YouTuber Nick Shirley's videos of African migrant traders on Canal Street appear to have contributed to the rise in recent ICE clearing the territory. ICE She also monitors social networks. Investigative publication Lever has uncovered documents showing the agency has deployed an artificial intelligence-based surveillance product called Zignal Labs, which creates “curated discovery feeds” to assist in criminal investigations. According to a message in Wired, ICE also plans to create a team of dozens of analysts to monitor social networks and set goals. Recent videos discovered by 404 Media and other publications allegedly showed ICE The agents use technology developed by the analytics firm Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel and others, to scan the social media accounts, government records and biometric data of those they detain. Social media has become a political panopticon in which your posts are a vehicle for your politics, and what you post can increasingly be used against you.
Meanwhile, a new wave of digital tools has emerged to help keep tabs on those carrying out surveillance. The ICEBlock, Red Dot and DEICER apps allow users to pinpoint where ICE agents are active, forming an online version of a whispering network to alert potential targets. Eyes Up gives users the ability to record and upload footage of law enforcement abuses, creating an archive of potential evidence. Its creator is a software developer named Mark (who uses only his first name to separate the project from his professional activities); he was inspired to create Eyes Up earlier this year when he started watching music videos ICE about kidnappings and stalking circulating on social media and concerns about their shelf life. As he told me, “They can disappear at any time, whether the platform decides to moderate or whether the person deletes their account or post.”
Ultimately, the application itself was also vulnerable to sudden disappearance. Since launching on September 1, Eyes Up has amassed thousands of downloads and thousands of minutes of video uploaded. Then, on October 3, Mark received notice that Apple was removing the app from its store on the grounds that it could “harm the targeted individual or group.” Eyes Up is not alone. ICEBlock and Red Dot were blocked from the Apple and Google app stores, the two largest marketplaces; DEICER, like Eyes Up, has been removed by Apple. The pressure on tech platforms appears to have come from the Trump administration; after the fatal shooting in ICE At the Dallas field office in late September, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement to Fox News Digital that ICEBlock “puts ICE agents at risk simply for doing their job.” Mark has been challenging Apple's decision regarding Eyes Up through its official channels, and ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron has argued that his app should be treated no differently than services like Google's Waze, which allow users to warn each other about highway pitfalls. But for now, they will have to try to make do with limited coverage.
