Despite a “shell game” of changing program names, most recently “Visa Lifecycle Vetting”, the general intent of what the DHS and President Trump previously refered to as the “Extreme Vetting Initiative” is clear and has remained unchanged:

1. To expand the ongoing unconstitutional warrantless and suspicious surveillance of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, foreign residents, and US citizens who travel internationally, so that this dragnet sureveillance will be carried on continuously rather than only in conjunction with specific controlled actions such as vsia issuance or  entering or leaving the US, as though international travel were per se probable cause for search and surveillance rather than the exercise of a right; and
2. To convert the present systems for making decisions as to who is or is not issued a visa or electronic “travel authorization“, allowed to enter or leave the US, or allowed to exercise their right to travel by common carrier, which are already based on pre-crime profiling, into a system of continuous pre-crime policing under which DHS pre-cogs can assign extrajudicial adverse consequences at any time, not just when individuals are attempting to engage in specific controlled actions.

While the DHS has made its intent clear, it has provided few details about who would be subjected to this “vetting”, what data would be used as inputs to the pre-crime prediction system, what algorithms would be used to make predictions, or what procedures would be followed in assigning consequences. More of this information has been provided in “Industry Day” briefings to private contractors to which these extraducial functions would be outsourced than to the public.

In November 2017, we joined dozens of other organizations in a letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security opposing and requesting more information about this program.

The response to our letter was a cursory brush-off providing no further information.

So this month, as part of a coalition led by Muslim Advocates, we filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for more information about these DHS programs, including infomation about outsourcing of “vetting” to private conteractors and about DHS monitoring of social media.

We requested expedited processing of our request, but we don’t expect a prompt response. The DHS has a dismal track record of noncompliance with FOIA deadlines. But we hope that this request will eventually help us learn more about DHS surveillance and control of immigrants, foreigners, and travelers, including which companies are building the infrastructure of this police state.

Today the Identity Project joins more than 20 other government-accountability and civil liberties organizations in a joint letter opposing S. 2192, the “SECURE Act of 2017”, which  was introduced in the Senate earlier this month and immediately placed on the Senate calendar for a floor vote at any time.

The name of this bill is Newspeak. It is not about security, but about surveillance and control of immigrants, borders, and international travelers, including  U.S. citizens.

The coalition letter to members of Congress that we signed today focuses on Sections 6002-6003 (pp. 488-499) of S. 2192,  which would authorize the Secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary of State, or Attorney General to exempt their respective Federal departments from the Administrative Procedure Act,  the Privacy Act, and the Paperwork Reduction Act with respect to a wide range of border control and surveillance activities.

The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) spells out the details of Constititionally-required “due process” as it applies to administrative decision-making by Federal agencies. Decisions adversely affecting individuals’ rights made without complying with the APA would be highly likely to violate Constitutional norms of due process.

Exemption from the Privacy Act  would allow the creation and maintenance, without notice, of secret Federal government databases about U.S. citizens, and the use of secret, unreliable, uncorrected, and/or irrelevant data as the basis for decisions to deny U.S. citizens their rights. These practices would also be likely to be unconstitutional.

Many of the provisons of S. 2192 are copied from S. 1757, an earlier omnibus “border control” bill we criticized when it was introduced in September.

Like its predecessor S. 1757, S. 2192 incorporates a patently unconstitutional “Passport Revocation Act” (Section 1632, pp. 446-448), which would purport to authorize revocation or refusal to issue or renew a U.S. passsport, and the prohibition of departure from or return to the U.S., on the guilt-by-association basis of (1) an extrajudicial  administrative designation of an organization as a “foreign terrorist organization”, and (2) an extrajudicial  administrative determination by the State Department that a U.S. citizen is “affiliated” with such an organization (without the law defining the meaning of “affiliated”).

The number of references to the “unreviewable discretion” of officials and agencies has increased from 14 in S. 1757 to 17 in S. 2192.

S. 2192 also includes provisions from S. 1757 mandating government monitoring of activities and ideas expressed on social media, and the use of this surveillance data for making visa decisions and for “continuous screening” (continuous surveillance and control) of immigrants, foreign residents (including permanent residents), and foreign-citizen visitors to the U.S.

Today The Identity Project joined 55 other civil rights, civil liberties, government accountability, human rights, immigrant rights, and privacy organizations in calling on the US Department of Homeland Security to abandon its Extreme Vetting Initiative.

The essential goal of the DHS Extreme Vetting Initiative is to extend the bogus “pre-crime” prediction algorithms and methods based on “big data” from suspicionless mass surveillance, already being used by the DHS and its partner agencies in the US and abroad to decide who is allowed to board airplanes, to a broader range of decisions about who is allowed to travel to, or reside or remain in, the US.

But the DHS doesn’t have any “pre-cogs”, human or robotic, to make these predictions. And prior restraint of our movements or other activities based on predictions of future criminality is not only impossible (and inherently subject to abuse by those who create the predictive and decision-making algorithms) but an affront to fundamental notions of justice, due process, and human rights.

According to a joint letter we sent today to the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Elaine Duke:

We write to express our opposition to Immigration & Customs Enforcement’s proposed new Extreme Vetting Initiative, which aims to use automated decision-making, machine learning, and social media monitoring to assist in vetting of visa applicants and to generate leads for deportation. As it is described in ICE documents, this program would be ineffective and discriminatory. It would also pose a signal threat to freedom of speech and assembly, civil liberties, and civil and human rights. We urge the Department of Homeland Security to abandon this effort….

The goal of the Extreme Vetting Initiative is to “develop processes that determine and evaluate an applicant’s probability of becoming a positively contributing member of society as well as their ability to contribute to national interests,” using analytic capabilities including machine learning.  ICE also seeks to “develop a mechanism/methodology that allows [the agency] to assess whether an applicant intends to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the United States.”

In reality, as a group of prominent technologists advised in a recent letter, “no computational methods can provide reliable or objective assessments of the traits that ICE seeks to measure.” There is no definition anywhere in American law of what it means to be a “positively contributing member of society” or to “contribute to national interests,” posing a risk that ICE will exercise maximal latitude to discriminate beneath the cover of an unproven algorithm….

Confirming that ICE’s focus is on quantity rather than quality, the agency has announced that the winning vendor for the Extreme Vetting Initiative contract must “generate a minimum of 10,000 investigative leads annually” – without regard to how many leads are actually appropriate….

The Extreme Vetting Initiative will also undoubtedly chill free expression, contravening the First Amendment and international human rights, such as those contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for which the United States has registered official support, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a party… These risks are particularly acute in light of existing initiatives to ask travelers to identify all of their social media handles in order to obtain permission to travel to the United States….

Through the Extreme Vetting Initiative, ICE seeks to automate the process by which the U.S. government targets, finds, and forcibly removes people from our country…. But this system … risks hiding politicized, discriminatory decisions behind a veneer of objectivity – at great cost to freedom of speech, civil liberties, civil rights, and human rights.

Palantir Technologies has already become a target of criticism for its role in building tools for “extreme vetting”. (See our report from a protest outside the home of Palantir founder Peter Thiel earlier this year, and this recent 10-minute video, “Is Silicon Valley Building the Infrastructure for a Police State? New AI tools could empower the government to violate our civil liberties.“)  Now IBM, which attended a recent outreach day for Extreme Vetting Initiative contractors and has declined to distance itself from bidding to build the pre-crime program, is also being targeted by a petition asking IBM to “back up your verbal support of immigrants by publicly rejecting and denouncing the Extreme Vetting Initiative and pledge to not bid on any contract to build the tool.”