Podcast: Saving social media

Last week, while the world watched JD Vance fly to Switzerland to negotiate an Iran deal, a quieter document surfaced from inside the Department of Homeland Security that may matter more to the daily lives of Americans than anything that happened at Lake Lucerne. A DHS Privacy Threshold Analysis, obtained and reported by NPR, outlines plans to give approximately 1,300 local police forces access to the same facial recognition technology that federal ICE agents currently use in the field. The app is called the ICE Task Force Module. It allows an officer to photograph any person they stop, run the image against federal databases, and receive an identity match in seconds. Every photograph taken is stored in a DHS system for fifteen years. The document states plainly that this surveillance will sweep up American citizens. The DHS knows this. It is proceeding anyway.

This is not an immigration story. It is a surveillance infrastructure story, and the distinction is the most important thing to understand about what is being built.