UN Human Rights Committee Report: ICE Electronic Data Surveillance Practices Violate Human Rights Law
by Matthew Thomas Clarke
The Human Rights Committee (“HRC”) of the United Nations, an independent body that monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”), issued a report on its review of U.S. compliance with ICCPR, which is one of only four human rights treaties ever ratified by the U.S. The November 3, 2023, report expressed concern about government agencies’ use for surveillance purposes of personal information databases systematically collected by private entities without individuals’ consent or protection for the right of privacy set forth in ICCPR. It also expressed specific concerns about the database dragnet continuously performed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), using private and non-law-enforcement government databases “exploiting the absence of data privacy regulations.”
At a HRC meeting in Geneva on October 18, 2023, committee member Professor Chanrok Soh brought up the issue of ICE’s electronic surveillance practices in response to a report submitted to HRC by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center and the International Justice Clinic at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. The report concluded that ICE’s draconian dragnet surveillance practices are an egregious violation of human rights law and U.S. ICCPR treaty obligations, finding that “ICE is engaging in daily, large-scale violations of Article 17 of the ICCPR, which prohibits unlawful or arbitrary interference with the right to privacy, and it’s not even a close case.”
Article 17 guarantees the right to privacy as a fundamental human right and requires a specific and accessible law when it is necessary to interfere with an individual’s privacy in pursuit of a legitimate government function. But ICE’s digital dragnet “is vast and indiscriminate” and has not been authorized by any specific law or regulation. ICE’s sources include “commercial data brokers, departments of motor vehicles, utility companies, automated license plate reader databases, cellphone location databases, social media, welfare records of unaccompanied children, and even foreign law enforcement databases in countries with precarious rule of law, such as El Salvador.” ICE uses a variety of automated analytical tools to process the data it receives from the sources. The tools include some that have repeatedly been proven to be inaccurate and contain racial bias such as facial recognition and risk assessment software.
There is no federal statute or regulation specifically authorizing such massive data sifting, as the ICCPR requires, and no independent oversight of ICE’s datamining activities. The consequences to everybody’s privacy are enormous. So far, ICE has scanned a third of U.S. driver’s licenses, has access to three-quarters of U.S. driver’s license data, and tracks the movements of three-quarters of drivers inside U.S. cities. It stores much more personal information about all U.S. residents.
“Such comprehensive surveillance is not explainable in terms of any specific law enforcement purpose. Rather, ICE’s goal seems to be the creation of an overall surveillance environment in which the agency will be able to use its data infrastructure to further any purpose that might arise for the government at any time in the future.” This frightening scenario not only violates ICCPR but makes one wonder what the government has planned for us.
Source: techpolicy.press
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