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Recently, as ICE operations intensified in New York, local inhabitants began fighting back utilizing available methods: directly facing agents on sidewalks, berating them as they proceeded through neighborhoods, and filming them on their cell phones. Persistent documentation has emerged as a reasonably potent weapon against President Donald Trump’s backing of ICE; agents have started wearing masks out of concern for being identified, and the increasing number of images displaying armed law enforcement and activated National Guard units in otherwise tranquil cities has emphasized the disturbing absurdity of their actions. Activist memes have proliferated on social media: a woman on New York’s Canal Street, clad in a spotted business-casual outfit, giving ICE agents the middle finger; a man in Washington, D.C., tossing a Subway sandwich at a federal officer in August. The recent “No Kings” demonstrations were populated by demonstrators in inflatable frog costumes, inspired by an identically dressed man who was pepper-sprayed protesting outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Building in Portland, Oregon. Some may dismiss the memes as resistance hype, but digital material is, at the very least, acting as a vibrant protective measure given the lack of effective governmental action.
Simultaneously, social media has become a revived origin of openness in recent weeks, recalling the period when Twitter turned into an organizing platform during the Arab Spring, in the early 2010s, or when Facebook and Instagram assisted in powering the Black Lives Matter marches of 2020. The basic optimism of that earlier social-media age is mostly gone, however, supplanted by a sense of posting as a final recourse. After Trump approved the implementation of the National Guard in Chicago earlier this month, the governor of Illinois, J. B. Pritzker, instructed inhabitants to “record and recount what you observe—post it on social media.” But, if the anti-MAGA opposition is capitalizing on the internet, ICE and the Trump Administration are also doing the same. Right-leaning content creators have been utilizing the same platforms to pinpoint and publicize targets for operations. According to a report in Semafor, the Trump-sympathetic YouTuber Nick Shirley’s videos of African migrant salespeople on Canal Street seemed to help propel recent ICE sweeps of the region. ICE itself is also trying to track social media. The investigative media The Lever found documents revealing that the organization has engaged an A.I.-powered tracking tool called Zignal Labs that develops “curated detection feeds” to assist in criminal investigations. Based on a report in Wired, ICE also intends to grow a team of dozens of analysts to monitor social media and identify targets. Recent videos, identified by 404 Media and other publications, have purportedly indicated ICE agents utilizing technology crafted by the data-analytics company Palantir, established by Peter Thiel and others, to scan social-media accounts, government files, and biometrics data of those they detain. Social media has evolved into a political surveillance state in which your posts are a conduit for your politics, and what you post can increasingly be employed against you.
In the interim, a fresh collection of digital instruments has surfaced to assist in surveilling the surveillants. The apps ICEBlock, Red Dot, and DEICER all enable users to identify where ICE agents are working, forming a digital equivalent of a confidential communication network to notify potential targets. Eyes Up offers a method for users to record and upload recordings of abusive law-enforcement behavior, building an archive of potential evidence. Its founder is a software developer named Mark (who uses only his first name to isolate the project from his professional work); he was prompted to build Eyes Up earlier this year, when he began viewing clips of ICE abductions and harassment circulating on social media and worried about how long they’d remain available. As he explained to me, “They could vanish at any given time, whether the platforms choose to moderate, whether the individual deletes their account or the post.”
Ultimately, the app itself was also susceptible to rapid disappearance. After launching, on September 1st, Eyes Up accumulated thousands of downloads and thousands of minutes of uploaded recordings. Then, on October 3rd, Mark received a notice that Apple was eliminating the app from its store on the rationale that it may “harm a targeted individual or group.” Eyes Up is not unique. ICEBlock and Red Dot have been restricted from both Apple and Google’s app stores, the two biggest marketplaces; DEICER, like Eyes Up, was eliminated by Apple. Strain on the tech platforms appeared to originate from the Trump Administration; after a fatal shooting at an ICE field office in Dallas in late September, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said in a statement to Fox News Digital that ICEBlock “put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.” Mark is challenging Apple’s decision about Eyes Up through its formal avenues, and the founder of ICEBlock, Joshua Aaron, has claimed that his app should not be regarded differently than services, such as Google’s Waze, that enable users to alert one another of highway speed traps. But for now they must attempt to manage with a restricted reach.
The politicized removal of these instruments reflects an irony—ICE is bothered that its own strategies have been utilized against it. Mark described a “double standard”: applications of technology that are favorable to the Administration’s objectives are going unchallenged, partly because tech companies have become increasingly willing to assist the President’s whims. “It’s evident whose rules they’re adhering to, who they are attempting to appease,” Mark said. Like other forms of personal expression, digital-communication technology has become perilously restricted under Trump; only the tools that function independently of Big Tech seem like reliable options for dissent. Posting clips of the spotted-dress woman on social media might be therapeutic, but it will only advance the resistance to a certain extent.
Nonetheless, we record and we post because it’s superior to the alternative, which is silently enduring governmental abuses. This past weekend, an acquaintance of mine in Washington, D.C., where I reside, sent a picture she had taken of armed National Guard members patrolling the Sunday-morning farmers’ market in Dupont Circle. Trump’s militarized policing has operated intermittently in the city since August, when the Administration seized control of the local police force, and inhabitants have become overly accustomed to seeing camouflaged soldiers intrude on our everyday activities. I most frequently encounter them strolling through largely empty residential streets in the middle of the afternoon, and I take pictures with my phone to note the foreboding superfluity of the exercise: our President’s drastic and hazardous reaction to a nonexistent crisis. Sharing recordings is a small reminder that this is truly occurring. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com