Comment by maxheadroom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxheadroom | Hacker News Reader

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>(OC)A law enforcement agency is procuring products and services with money from their budget, to carry out their work.

(Quotes from (A) https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/2995/ice-payi...)

>(A)In 2014, US-based surveillance and analytics company, JSI Telecom, signed a contract with ICE worth over $19.7 million for annual support, operation, and maintenance of its “Title III digital collection system”, according to US procurement records.

Yeah... I'm going to call bullshit on the "they're just trying to do their job" excuse. It's one thing to do it, it's an entirely different perspective to outright outsource the entire process to a contractor - with little to no oversight.

>(A)ICE is also known to be monitoring people sympathetic to enforcing immigrants’ rights, labelling them as “Anti-Trump” protestors.

Again, not an orginisation "carrying out it's work".

>(OC)What is the practical difference between this and their own "open source intelligence" efforts?

"Practical" left the building, a long time ago. We're in "real" world scenarios, right now. Let's address those, shall we?

Well what is the precise, distinct problem with them using a private contractor to do this? The contractor is collecting information which is public, and relaying information which may indicate that there is a case that ICE could pursue.

As far as I am aware, ICE already did this form of OSI in-house, but probably less effectively.

> >(A)ICE is also known to be monitoring people sympathetic to enforcing immigrants’ rights, labelling them as “Anti-Trump” protestors.

ICE working with this contractor is not what would cause them to monitor "people sympathetic to enforcing immigrants’ rights"†.

† Also, I think the quoted material is a bit too reductive: although there has been a move away from the phrase "illegal alien" since people have started associating the word with space aliens or something, there remains a pretty clear delineation between immigrants generally, and illegal aliens. I suspect that ICE is interested particularly in monitoring people who are endorsing an unlawful act[0], and likely to be providing material support for such an act. I suspect they are considerably less interested in people who, for example, help lawful resident aliens gain access to legal resources or social support.

[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325

>The contractor is collecting information which is public

I think that, maybe, you're confusing the Thomson Reuters situation[0] and this one. In this one, they're contracting the actual Title III intercepts[1] to be done via a contractor (which is what I understand from words such as: annual support, operation, and maintenance. [Well, operation by itself, really, but packaged together it's more inferred to as being as simple as going to a cloud provider.])

>ICE working with this contractor is not what would cause them to monitor "people sympathetic to enforcing immigrants’ rights"

Right. I never said it was? ...but to infer that ICE was just doing this as a normal course of business ignores the fact that some of what it's doing isn't (and never should have been) considered it's normative operations.

I have the distinct impression that we're talking past each and I apologise if any of the fault to be had is my own.

[0] - https://www.privacyinternational.org/feature/2079/updated-th...

[1] - https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Title_III_intercept

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