Immigration Raid Tracking App ‘ICE Block’ Keeps Your Data Private, Researcher Finds
ICE Block, an app that lets users warn others about the location of ICE officers, and which for a short while was the top of the social media App Store chart, does protect users’ privacy and doesn’t share your location with third parties, according to a recent analysis from a security researcher. ICE Block already claimed that it did not collect any data from the app; the analysis now corroborates that.
“It’s not uploading your location at all, when you make a report that report isn’t associated with your device in any way, and there are no third party services that it talks to or sends data to,” Cooper Quintin, senior public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who analyzed the ICE Block app, told 404 Media.
ICE Block lets users report nearby sightings of ICE officials. The app launched in April, but skyrocketed in popularity after CNN covered the app in June. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Kritsi Noem then said that “we’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute [CNN] for that.”
There is no indication that what ICE Block is doing is illegal, nor the coverage of the app. Its App Store page says “Stay informed about reported ICE sightings, within a 5 mile radius of your current location, in real-time while maintaining your privacy.”
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Joshua Aaron, ICE Block’s developer, told 404 Media “there are no legal issues with the app. Multiple constitutional and criminal attorneys looked at it before it launched and all agreed this is protected under the First Amendment.”
He added Quintin’s analysis “was great because he confirmed everything we’ve been saying about the app. It is 100% anonymous and we are not collecting or storing any identifiable user information.” Aaron declined to say how much the app was costing to run. He said Apple has not contacted him at all about the app and doesn’t expect them to.
To analyze ICE Block, Quintin said he viewed its network traffic, which would show what data was being transferred or not, viewed logs, and looked up what software libraries were used in the app.
404 Media recently reported on a different app called FuckLAPD.com that uses facial recognition to reveal the identity of LAPD officers. The developer of that project also made ICEspy, which is designed to provide the name of ICE officials, but at the time the underlying dataset was out of date.
ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts after officials slam it
The application, which allows users to add a pin on a map to show where ICE agents have recently been spotted, has climbed to the to the top of the App Store...Mariella Moon (Engadget)
‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops
A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”
“Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead,” the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer’s face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. “Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match,” the site says.
“fucklapd.com uses data provided by the City of Los Angeles directly to the public,” McDonald told me in an email. “This data has been provided in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits. That means all of this information belongs to the public and is a matter of public record. fucklapd.com is not scraping any data.”
In addition to potentially identifying officers by name and serial number, FuckLAPD.com also pulls up a police officer’s salary.
“Surprisingly it [the domain name] only costs $10 a year to exercise my first amendment right to say fucklapd.com,” McDonald said.
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I tested the tools by grabbing an image of a white and bald police officer from an LAPD press conference addressing its use of force during the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. I uploaded the image to the site, and within a few seconds the site presented me with nine headshots of officers who could be possible matches, all of them bald white men. The first correctly identified the cop in the image I uploaded.Clicking “view profile” under the result sent me to the Watch the Watchers site by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community group based in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. “All of the information on this website comes from records that were deliberately made public by the City of Los Angeles in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits,” the Watch the Watchers site says. “We plan to keep refreshing this data from new public records requests as well as to add other data.” Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is not associated with FuckLAPD.com and did not endorse the site.
McDonald told me that since the site launched, it had around 50,000 visitors, but “Because the analysis happens on-device I have no way of knowing what people are using it for, except for some people who have posted screenshots to Twitter or Instagram,” he said.
In 2018 McDonald made another tool called ICEspy which used hundreds of photos of ICE employees from LinkedIn and does much the same thing as FuckLAPD.com. “This app is designed to highlight and embarrass the organization committing atrocities against refugees and immigrants to the United States,” ICEspy’s website says. That tool originally used a Microsoft API, before Microsoft restricted access to it. McDonald said on X that he recently relaunched the tool to run locally on devices. 404 Media tested ICEspy using images of ICE employees on LinkedIn to verify if the tool worked and each result was incorrect; McDonald indicated on X he was looking for others to re-scrape LinkedIn and update the database.
Over the last few months ICE officers have consistently worn masks, neck gaiters, sunglasses, and baseball caps to shield their identity while often refusing to provide their name or even confirm the agency they belong to. This includes while violently assaulting people, detaining U.S. citizens, and pointing weapons at bystanders, leaving little room for recourse or accountability against the individual agents or the agency.
ICE’s constant use of masks has created a climate where people cannot be sure that the heavily armed group of men coming towards them are really federal agents or not. In Philadelphia, a man pretended to be an ICE agent in order to rob an auto repair shop and zip tie an employee. In Brooklyn, a man posed as an immigration officer before attempting to rape a woman.
ICE claims that assaults against its officers have increased by 413 percent, and use this as the justification for covering their faces. But as Philip Bump showed in the Washington Postthere are still plenty of questions about those numbers and their accuracy. ICE says its officers’ family members have been doxed too.
Neither the LAPD or ICE responded to a request for comment.
Joseph Cox contributed reporting.
'ICE Agent' Pulls Gun on Man Taking Photos of His Car
Activists post footage which also shows suspects being led away by masked agent.Billal Rahman (Newsweek)
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