The crackdown on free speech is inching closer to taking down individual people as ICE starts looking at dragnet surveillance of social media.
The Trump administrations efforts to crackdown on free speech has been going at a breakneck pace. There has been calls by the Trump regime to jail reporters for publishing factual pieces that hurts the Trump administrations feelings. That was followed up by a legal threat against the New York Times and Penguin Randomhouse for publishing content that also hurt the Trump administrations feelings.
All of this was followed up by the Heritage Foundation, an organization that played a critical role in installing the Trump dictatorship in the first place, moving forward with plans of doxing Wikipedian’s for the crime of publishing material the organization disagrees with. Jim Jordan and Elon Musk was also gearing up to weaponize the government to silence critics.
Things grew more tense when the Trump administration proceeded to silence the Associated Press for daring to properly call that body of water the Gulf of Mexico. Shortly after, shadow president, Elon Musk, renewed calls to jail reporters for daring to publish content that hurts the administrations feelings.
Now, some people might look at all of this and think that the good news in all of this is the fact that most of these assaults on free speech target high profile individuals. If you are a smaller fish, well, maybe you won’t get harassed as much. Well, if the recent reports are any indication, that may not exactly be the safest bet to be making at this point in time. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is looking to the private sector to start implementing a system that scours social media for criticisms against the government – sometimes referred to as thought crimes against the state. From TechDirt:
Apparently, ICE is feeling it might deal with a bit more backlash than normal now that Trump is back in charge and promising to expel as many immigrants as he can as quickly as he can. Rather than deal with it like grownups with big boy pants and black ICE shirts, the agency has decided it needs to employ a social media dragnet to keep apace with “threats” and mean stuff people are saying.
Here’s Sam Biddle with more details for The Intercept:
Citing an increase in threats to ICE agents and leadership, the agency is soliciting pitches from private companies to monitor threats across the internet — with a special focus on social media. People who simply criticize ICE online could pulled into the dragnet.
“In order to prevent adversaries from successfully targeting ICE Senior leaders, personnel and facilities, ICE requires real-time threat mitigation and monitoring services, vulnerability assessments, and proactive threat monitoring services,” the procurement document reads.
If this scanning uncovers anything the agency deems suspicious, ICE is asking its contractors to drill down into the background of social media users.
Now, Biddle says the document [PDF] “cites an increase in threats,” which is being far too kind. The request for services simply says this is happening, without actually citing anything at all in support of this claim of “increased threats.”
In fact, what the actual wording says suggests something different: ICE is experiencing an uptick in visible criticism from publicly-accessible social media accounts, which is definitely not the same thing as evidence it’s more dangerous to be employed by ICE now than it has been in the past.
Over the last two years, ICE has experienced an increased level of external threat activity directed towards its Senior leaders, personnel and facilities. Much of this threat activity originates from social media and online postings and has since expanded to physical attacks on ICE facilities and the homes of ICE employees.
There are no footnotes, no links to news reports detailing this “increase,” no citations of other government reports (you know, like DOJ indictments, etc.) that would support this assertion. The DHS simply says it exists and hopes no one will ask too many questions.
The report also notes that ICE wants to work with notorious facial recognition company, Clearview AI to help accomplish these goals.
The thing here is this: why would it stop at criticisms directed at this specific agency? I don’t see how it couldn’t simply get expanded to criticisms of the Trump regime more generally.
Probably the only silver lining to all of this is that enforcing this and going after anyone who has ever dared to say something mean about government is going to be a logistical nightmare. Any system even remotely like it has no shot at succeeding. Still, that’s not to say that a lot of innocent people could potentially get hurt in all of this.
Either way, the situation in the US is getting scarier and scarier by the day.
