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Immigration and Customs Enforcement has inked a new $5.7 million contract for AI-driven social media surveillance software, according to federal procurement records reviewed by The Lever. It’s the latest move in the agency’s ongoing quest to build out a social media surveillance dragnet. The five-year contract with government technology middleman Carahsoft Technology, made public in September, provides Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) licenses for a product called Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring platform used by the Israeli military and the Pentagon. An informational pamphlet marked confidential but publicly available online advertises that Zignal Labs “leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning” to analyze over eight billion social media posts per day, providing “curated detection feeds” for its clients. The information, the company says, allows law enforcement to “detect and respond to threats with greater clarity and speed.” The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has in the past procured Zignal licenses for the US Secret Service, signing its first contract for the software in 2019. The company also has contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation. But the September notice appears to be the first indication that ICE has access to the platform. The licenses will be provided to Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s intelligence unit, to provide “real-time data analysis for criminal investigations,” per the disclosure. Zignal joins ICE’s growing arsenal of social media surveillance tools, many of which employ artificial intelligence to generate leads and identify “threats” from vast quantities of online data. These tools pose a particular threat as ICE, under the Trump administration, appears to be increasingly using social media to direct its immigration enforcement strategy. Several pro-Palestinian activists, including Mahmoud Khalil, were targeted and jailed by immigration authorities after being doxed online by right-wing, pro-Israel blacklist websites like Canary Mission. Just this week, immigration agents raided street vendors in New York City after a right-wing influencer posted a video of the block online, demanding action by authorities. Last week, a group of labor unions sued over the federal government’s growing use of social media surveillance to target immigrants for their political speech, calling it a “mass, viewpoint-driven surveillance program.” And there are indications that ICE intends to further expand its social media surveillance capabilities. As Wired reported earlier this month, ICE has plans to develop a round-the-clock social media monitoring team to identify leads for immigration enforcers. Advocates told The Lever that ICE’s purchase of Zignal Labs licenses, like its other uses of digital surveillance tech, raises civil liberty concerns. “[The Department of Homeland Security] should not be buying surveillance tools that scrape our social media posts off the internet and then use AI to scrutinize our online speech,” said Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “And agencies certainly shouldn’t be deploying this kind of black box technology in secret without any accountability.”
