One of the most sinister aspects of ICE (aside from dragging innocent screaming people into unmarked vans and sending them to concentration camps) is that their agents are almost always masked. Not only that, they refuse to show identification or a badge confirming that they are who they claim to be.
ICE higher-ups weakly argue that their agents must go masked and conceal their identities to prevent them from being harassed. If true, that would apply to literally every other person working in law enforcement, so I don’t buy it.
The reality is that they know they’re being evil and desperately don’t want to face any consequences for it. Now, thanks to an ingenious Irish activist, consequences have arrived Politico reports that Netherlands-based immigration activist Dominick Skinner is using an ingenious combination of A.I. and people power to digitally rip agents’ masks off and expose their faces to the world.
Skinner explains the technique works on photos of agents “if they have 35 percent or more of the face visible”. The activists then ask A.I. to generate a predicted photo showing what that person looks like unmasked. That image is then sent to volunteers who manually feed it into facial recognition targeting social media.
60% of those results are false matches, but further volunteers put in the digital legwork to confirm the correct matches are accurate to the best of their abilities, and then they post the person’s identity online. Skinner argues he’s not posting addresses, just names, so says this isn’t technically doxxing: “I don’t believe in public justice, but I do believe in public shaming and public accountability.”
ICE is melting
All of this is legal, though ICE is furious. Spokesperson Tanya Roman said:
“These misinformed activists and others like them are the very reason the brave men and women of ICE choose to wear masks in the first place, and why they, and their families, are increasingly being targeted and assaulted.”
Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn even wants to make it illegal to expose an ICE agent’s name, and in June, introduced the Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act. She said behavior like this will help MS-13 and that “Those who oppose the rule of law are weaponizing generative AI against ICE agents.”
But Skinner isn’t going to stop anytime soon:
“If we look back at history and ask what we could have done better against Hitler, or what we could have done better when Mussolini came around, the reality is that Germans and Italians couldn’t have done much, but people could have done more from the outside.”
Maybe work like this will give anyone considering a career with ICE second thoughts. We can only hope that’s the case, as masked, anonymous, violent goon squads who disappear innocent people off the street are something that needs to be stamped out as soon as possible.
