The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring
Source: 404 Media
A contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and many other U.S. government agencies has developed a tool that lets analysts more easily pull a target individual’s publicly available data from a wide array of sites, social networks, apps, and services across the web at once, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, and various Meta platforms, according to a leaked list of the sites obtained by 404 Media. In all the list names more than 200 sites that the contractor, called ShadowDragon, pulls data from and makes available to its government clients, allowing them to map out a person’s activity, movements, and relationships.
The news comes after ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent Columbia University protester and green card holding legal permanent resident of the U.S., on Saturday with the intention of deporting him. It also comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reportedly launching an AI-fueled “Catch and Revoke” effort to scan the social media accounts for tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts, looking for what Axios reported as foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups.
There is no indication ShadowDragon specifically, or its data tool SocialNet, is part of that program. But ShadowDragon says in marketing material its tools can be used to monitor protests, and claims it found protests around Union Station in Washington DC during a 2023 visit by Benjamin Netanyahu. Daniel Clemens, ShadowDragon’s CEO, previously said on a podcast that protesters should not “be surprised when people are going to investigate you because you made their life difficult.”
Multiple tech companies and websites whose public data ShadowDragon pulls tell 404 Media the contractor may be violating their terms of use around scraping.
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Read more: https://www.404media.co/the-200-sites-an-ice-surveillance-contractor-is-monitoring/
404 Media's article links to the list of sites: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VyAaJaWCutyJyMiTXuDH4D_HHefoYxnbGL9l02kyCus/htmlview
Before anyone asks - Democratic Underground is NOT on that list. Neither Is Daily Kos. Which doesn't mean they're not being monitored by the Trump administration. Only that they're not on this particular list.
Bluesky is, along with Twitter, Facebook, Threads, TikTok, TruthSocial and Reddit. So are Github, GoFundMe, Google, Imgur, Amazon, Goodreads, Instagram, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Medium, Paypal, Pinterest, Skype, Snapchat, SoundCloud, Spotify, Substack, TripAdvisor, Tumblr, Venmo, WhatsApp, Yahoo, YCombinator, Yelp, YouTube...and of course a lot more.
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LOL! 