All posts tagged: department of homeland security

Airports, AI and Affordability: Week in Review | U.S. News Decision Points

Airports, AI and Affordability: Week in Review | U.S. News Decision Points

Published by Sam Flores

Summer’s in full swing as international travel heats up, Americans grapple with costs and Florida sues OpenAI. I’m Stella Garner, here with the week in review. Monday As anticipation builds for the U.S.-hosted World Cup, Olivier covered Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s threats to block international flights in “sanctuary” cities where local laws limit federal immigration enforcement. The U.S. Travel Association said such a move could cost the country roughly $8 billion in international travel spending and risk “nearly 50,000 American jobs.” President Donald Trump has been silent on Mullin’s plan, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy condemned the idea during a congressional hearing last month. Tuesday Next, Olivier explained Florida’s new lawsuit against OpenAI over safety and health concerns. Florida is the first state to sue the AI firm. The state’s 83-page complaint repeatedly uses the term “AI addiction,” reminiscent of state lawsuits against tobacco companies in the 1990s. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier called OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s conduct “reckless” and argued he should be held personally liable for harm to Floridians. The suit …

US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

Published by skeptic

In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists. More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat. This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States. Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category …

Palantir Held a Hack Week to Add New Controls to Software Used by ICE

Palantir Held a Hack Week to Add New Controls to Software Used by ICE

Published by skeptic

Palantir hosted a hack week this spring to try to turn internal consternation over the company’s work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into clearer oversight tools for products used in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to material reviewed by WIRED. The new tools provide organizations, including DHS and ICE, more information on how their workers use Palantir software. Organizations can set up alerts for “concerning behavior,” like exfiltrating datasets, and search the session logs of individual users. They also allow organizations to see which users have viewed specific sets of information. Palantir declined to comment. Palantir regularly holds hack weeks, challenging engineers from across the company to experiment with and solve problems in its products. This hack week focused on Palantir’s work with DHS and ICE, which has come under fire from both external critics and workers who fear the company’s tools are empowering the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. “This effort embodies the culture of the Palantir that I choose to work at,” Ted Mabrey, head …

An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in At Least 4 Deadly Shootings

An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in At Least 4 Deadly Shootings

Published by skeptic

The owner of a company that trained paramilitary Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents testified that he was involved in at least four lethal shootings, according to a 2021 deposition related to a lawsuit reviewed by WIRED. David S. Norman, the founder and proprietor of law enforcement training firm TruKinetics LLC, served as a Phoenix Police officer from the late 1990s until his retirement in 2020. Prior to founding TruKinetics the same year, according to records reviewed by WIRED, Norman was involved in six shootings while on duty that left four people dead and two more wounded. In every instance, the Phoenix Police Department said Norman fired on an armed suspect and exchanged volleys of gunfire in at least two of the shootings. Based in Gilbert, Arizona, TruKinetics offers training on small-team tactics, hostage rescues, close-quarters combat, building searches, night-vision firearms proficiency, pistol and rifle courses, “vehicle interdiction,” breaching with explosives, and sniper tactics, according to the company’s website. TruKinetics received $27,748 for a year-long contract to run a mandatory 40-hour training course that certain members …

A Woman Was in the US Legally. She Was Deported Anyways

A Woman Was in the US Legally. She Was Deported Anyways

Published by skeptic

That was Thursday, February 19, around 8:30 am. I was detained on February 18, around 11:30, so it took less than 24 hours for me to be deported. My daughter had been trying to search for me in the [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] tracker, the ICE tracker, and she could not find me there the whole time that I was moving down to San Ysidro. What happened when you got to Mexico? When I got to Tijuana, they turned us in to [the Mexican government] and they took us to a shelter where the Mexican government took us in.They helped figure out how we were going to get back to our hometowns. But I do have a friend that has a house in Tijuana, and she has family there, so I didn’t have to stay in the shelter until I got to my hometown, which is in Puebla, Mexico. How long were you in Mexico before you were able to return to the US? Forty days. What did your life look like coming back? …

Trump admin wants to seize Catholic shrine featuring 29ft statue of Jesus for Mexico border wall construction: report

Trump admin wants to seize Catholic shrine featuring 29ft statue of Jesus for Mexico border wall construction: report

Published by Sam Flores

The Trump administration is suing a Catholic diocese in New Mexico to seize land for border wall construction, a move that has led to a federal court case over religious freedom at a landmark pilgrimage site. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to acquire approximately 14 acres of land in Dona Ana County belonging to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces through what is known as the power of eminent domain. As reported by Bloomberg, the government intends to use the property to install fencing, security lighting and cameras near the base of Mount Cristo Rey. Federal officials have proposed $183,071 as just compensation for the tracts, according to the legal complaint. The site is home to a 29-foot-tall limestone statue of Jesus Christ and serves as a major religious destination. However, the Department of Homeland Security denied what it called “ludicrous” claims that the shrine would be affected. The legal battle centers on the base of Mount Cristo Rey, home to a historic 29-foot limestone statue of Christ that serves as a …

It’s been called the Ellis Island of the South. Now residents worry about ICE.

It’s been called the Ellis Island of the South. Now residents worry about ICE.

Published by Sam Flores

CLARKSTON, Ga. (RNS) — Soon after Muzhda Oriakhil and her husband came to the U.S. from Afghanistan in 2014, they settled in Clarkston, a small but thriving city outside Atlanta known as the “Ellis Island of the South” for the tens of thousands of refugees who have resettled there.  It was not an easy path. Without transportation, insurance or easy access to medical care, she lost her first pregnancy. Oriakhil has spent the past 12 years trying to make that landing easier for others. She is now a senior community engagement manager at Friends of Refugees, a faith-based organization that offers refugees adapting to American life a host of services, including healthy-mom classes and mom circles. Now she worries for the 300 moms who take part in the nonprofit’s initiatives for expectant mothers. The eight-week healthy-mom classes, which include throwing the moms a baby shower and offering postpartum support, used to draw 30 women. Now only 10 are enrolled. Terrified of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, families have retreated indoors — keeping children home …

DHS Plans Experiment Running ‘Reconnaissance’ Drones Along the US-Canada Border

DHS Plans Experiment Running ‘Reconnaissance’ Drones Along the US-Canada Border

Published by skeptic

The US Department of Homeland Security, in collaboration with the Defense Research and Development Canada, is looking to send autonomous drones and vehicles along the US-Canada border this fall, testing which products can stream surveillance video and sensor data between the two countries using commercial 5G networks. A new DHS call for participants frames the experiment, known as ACE-CASPER, as a multiday exercise “simulating a national emergency response scenario,” with drones and ground vehicles relaying live feeds to a bi-national command-and-control center as they cross the border. Vehicle autonomy, the document notes, is secondary to its primary aim: demonstrating “resilient, persistent 5G communications.” DHS and DRDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Scheduled for November, the tests would be the first joint US-Canada cross-border technology experiment along their shared border in nearly a decade. From 2011 through 2017, the two governments staged five cross-border drills under a program called CAUSE, testing whether emergency responders on either side of the line could share radios, video, and data with their counterparts across the border. …

DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts

DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts

Published by skeptic

The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year. Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties. Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US …

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys

Published by skeptic

It took just a few months of President Donald Trump’s second term for Palantir employees to question their company’s commitments to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when current and former employees started ringing the alarm. Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?” “That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but, ‘This feels wrong.’” Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA—at a moment of national consensus following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when many saw fighting terrorism abroad as the most critical mission facing the US. The company, which was cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sells software that acts as a high-powered data aggregation and analysis tool powering everything from private …