Mobile Fortify: ICE’s Dystopic Facial Recognition App

A Minneapolis woman observing ICE activity reports that an agent approached her car and addressed her by name even though they had never met.

The ICE agent told her that he was using facial recognition and recording her, which has also happened to multiple other U.S. citizens.

ICE agents are using a phone app called Mobile Fortify.

Mobile Fortify allows agents to:

• Take your photo;
• Scan your face and fingerprints;
• Instantly search state and federal government databases.

With Mobile Fortify, agents simply need to point a phone at anyone in public in order to compare their face against databases containing 200 million images and instantly access their name, date of birth, and other data.

Hundreds of millions of people are in these systems, including U.S. citizens here in Wisconsin. You don’t need to have previously interacted with ICE to already be in the database.

Mobile Fortify connects to databases including:

• Federal biometric systems;
• Passport and visa records;
• State driver’s license photos.

If you do happen to enter the database through a face scan in the app during an interaction with federal agents, the government keeps the scan up to 15 years regardless of immigration status. In comparison, TSA claims to delete your facial recognition data at airports after 24 hours if you are a U.S. citizen.

Facial recognition doesn’t confirm identity — it guesses.

False matches happen. One person can be matched to multiple different identities (including wrongly flagging U.S. citizens as undocumented immigrants). Furthermore, there are higher error rates for Black and Brown people.

Congressman Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, stated that ICE indicated that it treats Mobile Fortify as a “definitive” determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of U.S. citizenship, including a birth certificate, when the app says a person is undocumented.

Technology that is unreliable even in controlled settings should not be used to doll out consequences like detention and deportation. It isn’t difficult to imagine arrests due to some false match or database error.

This is how you build a biometric registry:

• Collect data everywhere;
• Store it long-term;
• Make it searchable anywhere.

In Minneapolis and Chicago, this tech wasn’t just used on immigrants. It was used on legal observers, peaceful protesters, and U.S. citizens.

This app is slowly killing privacy in public from law enforcement agents. The use of surveillance technologies like Mobile Fortify must be curtailed immediately.

Read more: Face Recognition and the ‘Trump Terror’: A Marriage Made in Hell | ACLU