Who's Watching You? Inside America's Surveillance State

Foreign.

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

And I'm Phil Proctor, remote from Rye, New York. So forgive me if I have a Rye sense of humor during our show today.

Hey, Phil, we know exactly where you are, address and everything. I have you actually on my map. I've been tracking you all day. Yeah, I think people in our audience understand that privacy is dead.And today we're going to talk about that.We're going to talk about what all this technology that we're surrounded by now, how it's affecting our privacy as a society, and whether or not the United States is becoming a surveillance state.We're going to break down all of the strange things that if you're paying attention, you've noticed about data breaches and what's been happening in Washington D.C. and so hopefully in the course of this hour, you'll learn and have a much better sense of who's watching you. Let's just get right into it.Most of us willingly submit to surveillance capitalism, like how every time you go online and you click and that click is followed by social media ads that reflect your activity and your posts, that's just the modern iteration of it. Modern history of U.S surveillance goes back to the 50s with the FBI and the Red scare and the Cold War and the establishment of the National Security Agency, which is still alive and well. In the 60s we had anti war and anti establishment protesters and dissident groups being surveilled.In the 80s we had the war on drugs and surveillance of black and Hispanic communities which we're having now.And of course then the big one with the advent of the Internet and technology, the 9, 11 attacks and the subsequent passage of the US Patriot act over 20 years ago, and that really helped establish what we know now as the modern day surveillance by intelligence agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, which was created out of all that.The ns, nsa, the CIA, the FBI, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and all the other ones we don't know about, we've been living with this now for about 20 years.But the second Trump administration and the advent of all this privatized information that we have now through these social media companies, etc, it was concerning when you saw all the big tech leaders sitting behind Trump at his inauguration.We've now seen them cozy up to Trump at the White House at dinners, and the question is, how involved are they in the transfer of all this information? I think one of the things we noticed first of all was Doge when Elon Musk raided agencies with Trump's blessings.And we know that they probably downloaded siloed private information on US Citizens that had been protected by each agency, precisely not to merge them all.We're going to talk about all of that with our guest today, Nicole Bennett, who's very concerned about the escalation of public private surveillance and how it's being aggressively employed to enforce refugee policies under the Trump administration. That's her background. Nicole is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography with a minor in Informatics at Indiana University.She's the assistant director of Indiana University center for Refugee Studies. And Nicole's focus is on the growing interaction of data governance, data technologies, and the US Federal government. In other words, big Brother.Welcome, Nicole.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

A piece you wrote really caught our eye earlier this month. It was entitled always watching how ICE's plan to monitor social media 24. 7 Threatens privacy and and Civic Participation.And you wrote that what most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed. Can you explain that?

Yeah, absolutely.So we tend to think of borders as lines on a map and or at the airport at a checkpoint, but really what it's becoming is the set of databases or algorithms or even platforms that we're using that follow people wherever they go. So in practice, your phone or your social media feed all are becoming potential border checkpoints.And so this is happening for people who have lived in the US for many years. They can suddenly find their data, their digital histories reread as evidence for deportability, which is long after any physical border crossing.So that's what I mean when I say this new front line may be your social media feed. This digital border is operating continuously. And so instead of that single inspection point at a port of entry, there's ongoing risk assessment.And that's a big change that I'm seeing happening today.

The Customers and Border Protection Agency searches social media posts on the devices of some travelers at the ports of entry. And the U.S. state Department reviews social media posts when foreigners seek visas to enter the United States. What are the implications of that?

Yeah, so this social media vetting, like you said, has existed already. The social media identifier started in 2019 with the state Department for visa applicants.And then in March 2025, that's when USCIS moved to add social media fields across all immigration forms.What's happening now is among other government agencies, they're buying Licenses from different companies or using different software, proprietary software, which this important for our conversation too. And they're purchasing data from data brokers like LexisNexis or Clear.And what that does is it formalizes data collection, it scales data collection. And in some cases it could be argued that it's a way around fourth Amendment due process rights.And so there's lots of things that are happening here that we can unpack.

Yeah, let's do that.Because the utilization of private sector for any kind of sensitive information has always been a way to dodge freedom of information requests in many controversial subjects. Even with the UAP subject, most of the evidence is held by private companies like Lockheed.So they're not responsive to government requests for information and as a result hold a lot of power. I would imagine this applies to custom Immigration and Customs Enforcement.In fact, the US Organization for that published a request for information for private sector contractors to launch a round the clock social media monitoring program.And the request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, MySpace, X, Tik, Tok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc, turning public posts into enforcement leads that can feed directly into ICE's database.

Exactly. So this is what's new. It's this proactive 247 monitoring. And so what you just read that is a quote from a draft contract document.So it's a request for information. And so it's not formal yet. This hasn't happened.But what ICE is looking to do is to have 224-7365 staffing centers, one in California, one in Vermont, and they'll be staffed by private contractors. And their job will be generating leads.In the proposal, they have this tiered system so urgent online leads, they have to develop them within 30 minutes if they're high priority, one hour, there can be some by the end of the business day. But it's this triage that's happening via private contractors.And so they're again combing those public posts and they're creating these and escalating these up with all of this data that is being pieced together now. So it's that social media data that they're scraping, it's these private data broker databases that they're purchasing and piecing together.And DOGE plays a part of this. Right? Because when they were created, part of that executive order lists out that they're there to break down information silos.And so information that was never meant to be paired together because when you pair unrelated information together, you're making inferences, you are making those connections as a human being or as an algorithm. And so, taken out of context, those data can mean different things. The margin for error is very high here.

This is being applied openly against undocumented immigrants, but it wouldn't be difficult to use this against perceived opponents and enemies of an authoritarian leaning administration.

Exactly.

I often post funny things about the Trump administration. I'm not a radical poster, but if I see something that. That relates to the danger that we're in terms of an authoritarian takeover of America.As a satirical comedian with some recognition of my celebrity, I feel obligated to do that.And I do wonder if Facebook, which is what I basically use, I do fear that what I'm doing is being tracked, and I'm certainly not afraid of any results from it, but. But I'm aware of it. And what do you think that situation is like for all of us who are doing that?

Absolutely. I think you raise a great point. I think that it can have a chilling effect. That's something that we.A term that we hear these days is a chilling effect on free speech or a chilling effect on opposition.So if you post something, even in jest, or you are connected with someone who is posting something, or you post about being at a protest and it includes the faces of other people, that data can now be misread as a lead. Right. And people with immigration ties or their friends who are US Citizens now feel like they have to self censor.So that suppresses organizing, that suppresses reporting everyday participation in social life, because a lot of our social life is here on the Internet. It's this use of infrastructure to track and reinterpret that is largely invisible and is absolutely impacting everyday life.When you have that and you combine that with this fast and automated triage and facial recognition, that's error prone. Yeah, I see it impacting our everyday life in many ways.

That's something you think you'd hear about in China, Russia, North Korea, and of course, they're far more extreme. China built their Internet with surveillance in the genesis of it. Ours is following up with it now.And you think that you have empowerment on your social media posts, that I can say whatever I want, I can do whatever I want. But with the Sexy Boomer show, we have a Facebook page because a lot of our listeners are on Facebook.We took the summer off and came back a couple of months later to start posting, and the site was shut down by Facebook, saying that we were impersonators of our own page. And there is no recourse to contact Facebook. They don't have any concern, they don't have any public service in that respect.You can suggest to them a problem and they say, thanks for your feedback.But there's no connectivity, there's no responsiveness, and we're at the mercy of some faceless organization that has incorrectly determined us to be impersonators of our own show. And we can't get on. We can't send messages to our audience. That's just a stupid mistake. But imagine something like that being intentional.

I think that's a fantastic example. If you scale that to everyday life for someone who is either undocumented or someone who is resisting or in opposition or going to protests.For you all, it was the inability to access your Facebook page. For someone else, it can be deportation. It can be loss of livelihood.When we're sensing that this boundary between speech and surveillance has collapsed, even making a joke online feels risky.Because that same data that has driven targeted ads, which I don't know about you all, but I have found that the targeted ads I have received are phenomenal. They speak to me. They have that down to a science.But when the data that drives that targeted ad advertisement sphere is now feeding enforcement algorithms that don't understand context, and then you also have no place of recourse if something happens to you because an algorithm determined that you should be surveilled more. But the consequences for you not able to access your Facebook page, very real life consequences too, when applied in an enforcement sense.

Let's say robots rule.

Yeah, they don't have much in the way of personality.

No humor. You haven't learned humor yet.

No, it also expresses the idea that there's no accountability anymore, which applies to our government and so many things in our lives right now. But I also want to ask you, There is such a thing in my thinking as little brother and not big brother, but little brother.And that is, nobody predicted that we would have phones with videos that we can carry in our pockets and that we can actually influence people by showing them what was happening to us. When, for instance, there is an ICE raid. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think there's a really phenomenal and interesting place of research when we think about how people are repurposing tools of surveillance for resistance.So to your point, taking videos when ICE are either coming to protest or they're coming to people's places of work or they're raiding a school, the ability to film that, I think is powerful. And I think the more I look into this, the more I see different ways people are resisting. What was the app called that was taken off App Store?I'm blanking. Was it Ice Block?

Yeah.

Where you could report your. And so technology is not inherently good or bad in my belief. I would argue technology is not inherently good or bad.It's how we decide to use it and it's how we decide to embed it. Governance structures.And so to answer your question, there are really good uses of technology for resistance and opposition in a multitude of contexts. There's technology is fantastically useful in art and music and everyday life, and it also carries risk.

Yeah. You can be hiking in the mountains, well out of Cell Zone, and now you can hit a button and get to a satellite and get a 91 1.There's wonderful things, but then there are other things, not just surveillance. In terms of online for many years now, here in Santa Monica, they have a at least one SUV that is completely unmarked, black, that is a scanner.And it scans everything within a certain range in proximity to the vehicle and drives around. And it can, if it's pulling alongside you, it can pull down your data on your phone, whatever.And when I asked the police department about it, they sheepishly grinned at me like, yeah, but I can't talk about it. And this is Santa Monica, the People's Republic, where everything is on video with facial recognition.And again, that is a great boost for security and crime, no question. People just don't get away with stuff much anymore because of the cameras. But again, it's that regulation I think we should get into.Who's behind this? They. Who is the they?The tech bros, if you will, that have put a lot of money and energy behind this Trump administration to further their gains, which is primarily money and power. For example, they passed a regulation that AI industries cannot be regulated for the next 10 years. How did that happen?Let's go back to the beginning of the administration. With Doge, Elon Musk invests $250 million, which is lunch money for him, into re electing Trump.In return for that, he gets full access because with Trump, everything's for sale.They announce Doge the Office of Government Efficiency, and then we see them raiding agencies against the will of the workers there, the career workers. And they went in there with all these tech nerds and downloaded this siloed, secured data on American citizens.They don't even really talk about whether they did that or not. Nicole, do you know anything about that?

So I think the Reason why it's hard to find out is because it's purposefully obfuscated. Like it's purposefully. It's purposefully hard to find information. But yes. So like you said, DOGE initiative launched in 2025. And it's in.I think the really, one of the really important things to point out about it before we dive into what it's actually doing is that it was pushed forward to cut spending, streamline government, dismantle information silos. It's the efficiency part that is an indicator of privatization. Right. When we talk about private companies, efficiency is key, profit is key.That's not necessarily how we think of the government and how we want the government to operate in terms of efficiency versus mistakes. And the White House clarified that Elon Musk was an advisor and not an employee.And what's really interesting, and this goes back to what we were saying about opposition, but there are court cases and watchdogs that have tried to force more transparency over what happened. So what we know is that there have been reports wired as a great example.They've reported how Palantir reps joined IRS engineers and had access to IRS databases. Right. And it's it had access to the Treasury. So we know this because a federal judge temporary block DOGE access to that treasury payment system.We're like piecing together what DOGE is doing through courts or whistleblowers or watchdogs. But the DOGE staffer who accessed HHS's unaccompanied alien children portal and that access being described as read only.But again, that's under scrutiny because who knows what changed? Or the Department of Energy, Social Security. So there are these different pieces where the ACLU is another organization.They have FOIA litigation seeking records of DOGE access across agencies. To answer your question, we don't fully know what happened or what was accessed or how it was used. There are people fighting to learn that.And I think that is hopeful.

The fact that we're chasing that train rather than having been able to stop it. Yes, the genie's out of the bottle. It's over, it's done. You're not going to get that back.That information is not going to be put back in silos and protected.And it's being transferred to private contractors who are tasked with, as you wrote, scraping publicly available data to collecting messages, including posts and other media and data. And you wrote that those files don't exist in isolation.They feed directly to Palantir, a private company, which I want to get into, because people have heard about. Palantir is just an outsized influence on the government and the data.Palantir has a technologies investigative case management system and it's the digital backbone of modern immigration enforcement.This social media that we're talking about, that data would be joining a growing web of license plate scans, utility records, property data, biometrics, creating what is effectively a searchable portrait of a person's life.

Yes.Palantir is a company and it has many contracts with the US government and it's selling, for the sake of simplicity, a couple of different kinds of software. The one that I've primarily focused on is called Gotham and Palantir and Gotham, those names are not randomly made up.Palantir is from the Lord of the Rings and Gotham is from Batman. We have some signaling here that's really interesting to look into. Palantir sells Gotham.And what Gotham is purported to do and how they advertise it is it takes fragmented data and it breaks it down into its smallest pieces and it turns it into a unified searchable web for investigators. So why is this really attractive to the US Government? The US Government has data in all sorts of forms.They've been collecting data for a very long time. And again, that interoperability is the new thing that we're seeing. So what Gotham does is it allows that to happen.So because it's fragmenting data, think DMV records, police reports, biometrics, at this point subpoenaed social media data, soon, publicly available social media data, license plate data, all these types of data. And it's making investigations faster because it's enabling this search of sorts. And so how do we know this?There's been some FOIA operating manuals of Gotham that have been really helpful to figure out how these technologies are being useful. Because Ted, like you said before, this is private software, this is proprietary software.So not only is it hard to to FOIA request what is happening, because private contractors don't fall under the same types of laws that agencies do, but then you add the proprietary piece in there and that adds a whole different legal thing to deal with. And so because Gotham is proprietary, the public elected officials, we can't see how the algorithms are weighing evidence.But the conclusions that we're drawing from these different searches have life altering decisions like deportation or increased surveillance.This idea of a preemptive style of governance from patterns in the data that an algorithm is telling us instead of direct evidence is changing how we have historically been legally safeguarded.

Palantir claims it does not collect or store data but only helps analyze data that customers have already collected and and then provide services and platforms where customers retain the rights. One of their big applications is in warfare.They are coordinating the Ukraine resistance against Russia's invasion in real time battle scenarios to respond to Russian attacks. They do very well.They are a $430 billion company and just this year the Economist called Palantir possibly the most overvalued firm of all time with that market value of 430 billion, over 600 times its 2024 earnings. And just this month, its shares were the most expensive on the S&P 500 at 85 times the expected forward annual sales.So you want to talk about the AI bubble? Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, who's a controversial character. He was one of the founders of PayPal along with Elon Musk.He was born in Germany. He was raised for a time in South Africa.And there's an interesting thread here because I think it's important to understand who's behind these efforts in these private companies. So Peter Thiel hired the CEO, Alex Berg. He was born to a interracial marriage. His mother was a black artist. He was a Biden supporter until he wasn't.Now he's a Trump supporter.And 13 former workers this May wrote a open letter accusing Palantir's leadership of having abandoned its founding values and of being complicit in normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a revolution led by oligarchs.And Alex Berg, in an interview I watched recently said, when the New York Times says we're eviscerating human rights, blah, blah, blah, that's complete malarkey. And it's just amazing what power and money will do to someone's values.

And you bring up an interesting point about the valuation and how it has ballooned of this company in particular. And I think what's interesting is what is not new is the government contracting with private companies, right?They hire consultants all the time to do different things.What is new and what I am seeing with Palantir is how embedded these systems are becoming into our U.S. so say you have a $200 million a year contract because you're using this system, Gotham, for example, and it's enabling law enforcement or ICE or whoever's using it to quickly turn around these leads. It's politically costly to remove that technology. And so it's becoming embedded into our enforcement processes. Removing it is difficult.I'm not saying it's a guaranteed contract, but it is very difficult to extricate yourself as a government, once you have this capability. Because who is going to make the argument? Let's go back to a slower, less efficient way.I would, because human rights, but from a political perspective, do you know what I'm saying? It's harder to remove yourself from that once. Once you're embedded.

Yeah.And Wired cited a former Palantir employee that the government can rely on, Gotham, which is Palantir's operating system, to do all this, to, quote, centralize everything an agency knows about a person in one place. That's not Big Brother. I don't know what is. You're listening to Phil and Ted Sexy Boomer Show.You can hear all of our shows on our website, SexyBoomershow.com our guest today is Nicole Bennett from Indiana University, who has written a really brilliant piece on our subject today, which is privatizing public information about American citizens and these days, undocumented immigrants and how they're using that as a weapon.

I was totally aware of this subject of today's show because I have a certain app called the Philip app, and I know what's happening everywhere all the time. And here's the real thing that's interesting. I don't need an iPhone, but that's my little secret.

Oh, great, Phil. Good to know.

And by the way, I want to ask you, Nicole, how is it that you went on the path that you have been following? What motivated you to focus on. On this particular aspect of the danger to our society?

That's a great question. It's been a windy road, to be honest.It started so I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Vanuatu, which is a tiny island nation in between Fiji and Australia. And everybody should go if they have the chance. But when I was there, I lived in a village called Lingarak, and there was no cell phone service.There was no electricity. And so it was. It was life disconnected. And it was best years of my life, if I'm quite honest.And then I moved to Uganda and I worked with Global Health Corps and the Ministry of Gender, labor and Social Development in Kampala, Uganda, on child protection policy, which is what got me very interested in policy. And I was seeing how data were being collected and used in UN reports.And I was just curious, how do we make the decisions of what is going into these reports? How are we counting people? How are we counting different instances of whatever we're trying to research at a government level?I came to Indiana University for their public affairs program and was really interested in the quantification of people and the quantification of social processes. And the more, the more I got into it, I decided I need to go get a PhD and think about how people are moving.And I wanted to originally study climate change and refugees, which Ted, I know you had mentioned that previously, but then seeing everything that's happening and seeing everything around me, how can you not study this? How can you not look this directly in the eyes and call a spade? I think it's a civic duty.

Nicole, people in your age, now I assume you're in your 20s, people are not resigned to this fate of the extinction of privacy and rights. Do you think there is going to be some pushback and do you think it's going to work?

The great question. I think, I think it is. And I say easy, let me say the sentence and then maybe let me say it again.I think it's easy to lose hope, especially when you feel like you're surrounded with data and surveillance and technology and we can't escape it. And I do think, I don't get the sense that there's hopelessness from young people writ large.I think that people are creative and people are using technology in really interesting ways and ways that we don't even know about yet. And I do have hope.I keep coming back to there have been several cases throughout history where all people, young people, older people, don't just take what they're given and they resist. And I do think that we will come out of this on the other and I think a lot of people will be hurt.I think a lot of people are hurting and have been hurt in this scenario, in the times we're living in now. I do think transition will happen. I do think change will happen. I think people need to get informed and look at it for what it is and learn about it.

Maybe we can revisit what was vilified by the Reagan administration, which was government is bad and regulation is bad and regulation is, is for the service of government. Maybe set common sense regulation for dark money neutralizing Citizens United to get these ultra rich powerful people back in line.There's a path that way. There are things that exist that people aren't even aware of. The NSA built the Utah Data Center.It's a facility outside of Salt Lake City that stores vast amounts of data for U.S. intelligence community. Its capacity is estimated to be in the exabytes.When you have that much storage capability, you can gather information about everybody and everything so that if you cause trouble 10 years down the road, even though you may not be on the radar now, they have your information, then can forensically go back and trace you and use that information for ill or good.

Yeah. And so you bring up an interesting point about this data center. So it's. It's.The mission of the data center is classified, so it's hard to figure out what it's really doing. But the research that has been done and uncovered, we're assuming, because it's led by the nsa, that it is going to hold data.And I don't even know how to explain how much data that this is. The order of exabytes. It's almost unfathomable.

It's like trying to count Elon's money.

And so it's. I see it as this physical symbol of a store now figured out later, like you were saying, using it in five, 10 years. And what I.We're talking about resistance and hope you don't realize how much water and how much resources. Data centers like this, or data centers across the United States, across the world take it, is an immense environmental impact.And there's some really cool research being done on this. Not by me, but I would love to have the time. There's local resistance to these data centers being built by different communities.That is a form of resistance.

True.

There's a lot of this happening in Texas, for example. And yeah, just this is. That's a conversation.

That's why we're talking about reviving nuclear power generation on small scales to run this. They're testing nuclear reactors, actually, in Utah. Supposedly much safer systems to generate energy.

It seems, actually, Ted and Nicole, it seems that many people are already complaining at the high cost of electricity.What they're being charged for, which I understand, and maybe you can tell me about it, is based on these AI, great AI farms, data farms that we as consumers are paying for. And what you're talking about is putting them on generators of some sort so that we don't have to pay for it. Is that right? Or am I crazy?

Is that something Nicole, you know about?

This is not my realm of study, but I do know that I think currently there's an estimate. I think I have it in my notes. Yeah. 9,000 Data centers globally. That's what the estimate is.

Wow.

Which of all different sizes.

And they're building them in deeply rural areas because that's where electricity is cheap.

Yes.

These poor souls who have a nice little farmhouse suddenly have this giant roaring sound of generation with bright lights going 24, 7 and just ruining their lives because the companies have decided to go there because it's cheap. Power.

And again, it's not just what happens after it's built. You have to mine and manufacture the materials to build the center. You actually have to build the center then to operate the center.All that electricity, all that water use and then all of the waste that comes out of that center is such a massive environmental undertaking.

And yeah, yeah, but wait till you see all the art and illustrations of Sexy Boomer show is going to be posting. I think we should get to the some of the solutions to all of this before we wrap. But we have a little time and I want to go back to Paler.Let me ask the question. Is Paler have white supremacy leanings? And I'm not asking you necessarily, Nicole, to address it.I'm just asking it metaphorically because Palantir's founder, Peter Thiel, who has enabled the rise of JD Vance, and they're probably grooming him to take over for the old man when he finally loses it. And boy, is he losing it. As we mentioned before, Peter Thiel was part of a group known as the Paypal Mafia.Libertarian billionaires including Elon Musk with roots in South Africa under white rule, and they're now hugely influential in U. S tech, industry and politics. It also includes a couple of other players who have ties to South Africa.And the reason I asked that because in a 2021 biography of Thiel, the founder of Planeteer called the Contrarian, he alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as economically sound.And David Sachs, PayPal's chief operating officer, formerly is now the fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. There are other players too. Their outsized influence on the Trump administration is obvious.What's less obvious is, and it's just starting to break the news, but through personal relationships, I know of career diplomats, State Department officials who have been stationed all over the world. And a few months ago after Trump was reelected, they were transferred to Switzerland to prioritize immigration of white South Africanas.And we've seen groups of white people being expedited into the country from South Africa because of oppression there. The Trump administration has greatly curtailed the number of immigrants, down to 7,500 this year.And there seems to be what my friends told me was that they were ordered to prioritize only white South Africans for immigration into the country. It begs the question, do these people have an agenda and is white supremacy part of that?

I think that's an interesting question. I don't know them personally, so I can only. And when we talk about the 7,500 a year. Right. That's the number. That is 7,500 people from South Africa.

I'm sorry, not 7,500 from South Africa, just 7, 500 in total. I don't know how much of that people from South Africa for sure.

Exactly. Thank you for checking me on that. Yes. The guess is that or the hypothesis that most of those slots would be going too. People from South Africa.Thank you for that. So I think it's really important when we talk about this to remember that we're talking about the refugee cap.And so it's not talking about immigration writ large, but only refugees. So the US Refugee admissions program was paused in January by executive order, and now we're seeing potential movement to it opening up again.But instead of, I think it was 120,000 refugees a year to 7,500, if we think about how different that is. There were reports when the U.S. refugee Admissions Program was paused that it was immediate effect.So if you are a refugee who had gone through all of that paperwork, the paperwork to come to the US As a refugee is substantial. I mean, you have to go through six federal agencies, multiple checks, give up a lot of data, go through interviews, health check.They are some of the most vetted individuals on the planet.

And the ones that have gone through that have been approved are now being turned away.

If they were in transit, there were reports of them being turned away.

I just brought that up about the white supremacy issue because it just between that aspect of the immigration prioritization of white Africanas and so many of these people being with roots there and Trump being for sale. But when you look at what's happening with the ICE enforcement, they're literally indiscriminately chasing down people of color, even US Citizens.They're not vicious criminals. Of the people that were deported to Salvador, the Venezuelans, 3% of them were violent criminals.The vast majority of them weren't, but they were labeled criminals. It's almost trigger words for racism.

I think it was the guardian that found this, but there was a case where the Department of Homeland Security were being trained on what tattoos equated to Venezuelan gang affiliation.And they reverse image searched one of the tattoos that was indicative of Venezuelan gang affiliation, and it traced back to a social media photo of a British citizen.And when we're talking about the data that we're scraping, the data that are being used to train all these different systems, even if you take a step all the way back and you look at the data that's first being put input to these systems to train, some of it's flawed and what does that mean for the output? And so this issue is that the infrastructure that this software is building and that is what the danger is. The danger is that it's structural.Once these systems are linking government and commercial data and previously private assumed private data. Right. Then you can enable surveillance on anyone.

When you have the President of the United States calling political opposition radical lunatic left wackos enemies, it's very dangerous. When you have these tools that you're fingertips.

Absolutely. And there's historical precedent for this. Right. The example that I go time again is the U.S. census.Historically that was for resource allocation and the counting of people. In World War II, the US army used it to locate and inter Japanese Americans.

That's right.

It is not unprecedented what has happened. The scale and the scope is. But the mission creepy of technology and how the US government has used it is not new. It has happened before in the five.

Minutes or so we have left. Let's talk about the upside here. Some solutions. You wrote in your piece there are some opportunities to reverse this somehow.And one was transparency. And that would start with public disclosure of the algorithms and the scoring systems that ICE uses.Tell us about that and the other things you're talking about with ACLU, etc.

Absolutely. At the very base of it, I would love for agencies to respond to FOIA requests. If we take a step back, that would be great.So that all of these organizations don't have to spend their money to sue agencies to adhere to foia. With, with that being said, there's other. Absolutely. There's other things that we can do.I would love to see public reporting for high risk contracts. So again, this request for information that ISIS put out, I think it would be.I think it's very important to require public reporting of the data sets that are being used. What are the logics that are being used into it? What is the margin of error when you find that you have made a mistake?We see this with facial recognition technology.

Right.

You can be mistaken for someone else. So what are those margins of error?

Yeah, like us on Facebook and sexy boomers.

A real thing that agencies can do is include use limitation clauses and so that that RFI from ICE does have something in there about. It's only going to be used for people who are. I forget exactly. It's in my article. I forget their exact wording about.Only for people who are part of the investigation specifically say that the tool cannot be used for unauthorized means. The problem with that is it's essentially a dragnet. Right.So if the algorithm says that, Ted, you and I are related, and you post something on Facebook, that I am now part of that investigative circle. And so I think people. Let me end with this. I think people have different risk profiles. I think for people like me, I have a very low risk profile.So I feel comfortable doing this research and saying these things and having social media where I say this kind of research. I think for someone who is an undocumented individual in the United States, they have a much higher risk profile.And so perhaps they put their profile on private. Or maybe you don't post as much on social media.But then again, that leads into that chilling effect of free speech and our right to exist and our right to. To participate in civic and everyday life. So it is this balance.

That's why I wear a mask most of the time when I'm in public. And I actually, I'm wearing a mask right now just in case somebody recognizes my voice on the radio.

That's a good look, Phil.

So I feel safe.

Yeah. Several U.S. senators have introduced legislation to limit bulk purchases from data brokers.The Brennan center for justice and the ACLU argue that there should be independent oversight of surveillance systems for accuracy and bias.I think maybe the note to leave it on here is that the hope for the future, like the old Masonic rule of the pendulum, the further you swing it in one direction, will always come back. And this era of the second Trump administration has pushed the pendulum so far to the extreme that it's inevitably going to swing back.But it's really going to be dependent on young people. It's really going to take the new generation of young people to stand up and say, you have made our lives impossible. Our futures have been stolen.We can't afford a house, we can't afford any kind of living just because of the depth of corruption and graft in the name of capitalism.And one could hope that there'll be such a swing legislatively that maybe there'll be efforts to change or neutralize or reverse Citizens United, ban institutional ownership of single family homes. But it's your generation's call. Nicole. Do you feel any energy amongst your peers?

Yeah. You feel confident about that?

I'm curious to see how the midterms go and how we can galvanize the youth vote. I think that's extremely important. I think it requires everyone.I think it requires the people to get out and vote people to educate themselves and use the resources that are out there to protect themselves. And I think we really need people in positions of power and policy to start pushing for safer technology use and sunset clauses.Don't just assume a system has to be there perpetually, view it and re approve it periodically. I think it takes everyone, it certainly.

Takes people like you. So, so happy to have met you and made your acquaintance. I wish you all the best and we hope you continue what you're doing.Nicole Bennett is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography with a minor in informatics at Indiana University and she's assistant director of the Indiana University center for Refugee Studies. Thank you so much, Nicole. Keep up the great work.

Thank you.

It was wonderful to talk to you and hear from you today. Thank you so much.

I'm Ted Bonnitt and he's Phil Proctor. Thank you so much for listening and stay sexy.