Three years ago, a rainstorm rocked my family’s house in Minnesota. The thunder roared so loudly the power lines lost their nerve — and so did we, hunkering down in the basement with a flashlight and a handful of books. It was my first time actually reading George Orwell’s “1984.” I lied my way through the high school class where it was assigned.
I read it in one night. The images that stuck with me were the ones most people know: suppression, surveillance, the slow erosion of truth. The book still gets mentioned constantly because those themes keep showing up in the news. One line specifically stuck out to me: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
But in order for a boot to come down on a target, it needs eyes — it needs a spotter.
Today in the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is increasingly equipping itself with those eyes.
An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting discussed the story of 23-year-old Jesus Gutiérrez, a U.S. citizen walking home from the gym when he was stopped by federal immigration officers. Agents placed him in an unmarked SUV and handcuffed him.
When Gutiérrez couldn’t immediately produce identification, the agents turned to another method. They photographed his face. Within minutes, using a mobile app, they determined he was telling the truth about his citizenship.
The app, called “Mobile Fortify” can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by pointing a camera at them, according to emails obtained by 404 Media. No warrant. No court oversight.
ICE is not simply checking IDs anymore. As of last fall, it is scanning faces.
Since its inception, facial recognition software has been notoriously biased. According to an MIT study referenced by the ACLU, the error rate in misidentification for light-skinned men was 0.8 percent, as opposed to 34.7 percent for darker-skinned women. ACLU reported it sued on behalf of Kylese Perryman, who was falsely arrested for robbery based solely on incorrect facial identification.
“This is a bipartisan issue.” Don Bell, policy council at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan, independent watchdog of government reforms, told me.
“People should be looking at this in the traditional sense of how Americans have always viewed their government: with distrust. Going all the way back to the founding of the country, the framers of the Constitution distrusted too much power being in the hands of the government,” Bell said.
Bell believed the app was a gross overreach by the government in its surveillance.
“You really should be asking yourself, do we need to do this? And how can this be targeted against me and my community? Because one day it may be one administration that’s targeting one group of people, and the next administration could be targeting another group of people, and it only makes us all less safe and free,” Bell said.
America it seems isn’t just walking toward a surveillance state. It remains running, and somehow doing it in silence as the public is distracted. But if we get too distracted, we risk letting our basic freedoms and rights being pulled from under our feet.
As Bell previously stated, the Mobile Fortify app is simply unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment protects individuals against unreasonable government searches. If government officials don’t have reasonable suspicion, under the Fourth Amendment they are not entitled to receive identification. Scanning someone’s face without permission should fall under this.
This was established well in the case of Brown v. Texas in 1979.
Two officers were creeping by an alleyway with high drug traffic in their police cruiser when they spotted a man who they hadn’t seen in the area before. When Edward Brown refused to identify himself, the officers arrested him. The U.S Supreme Court ruled that the arrest violated Brown’s Fourth Amendment rights because the officers lacked reasonable suspicion to believe Brown had engaged or was engaged in a criminal act.
I’d like you to imagine what would be a fair ruling if instead of two suspicious cops flagging Brown for an arrest, it was an app on someone’s phone that scanned him and flagged him as a suspect, why would it not still be a violation of Brown’s Fourth Amendment rights?
A more recent U.S Supreme Court decision in 2001— Kyllo v. United States — ruled that there was a breach of the Fourth Amendment through an interior agent’s use of a thermal imaging device without a warrant. The imaging device was used to scan Kyllo’s triplex for the heat signatures associated with the high-powered lamps usually used to grow marijuana. The court ruled that the use of the device was the search itself, so the evidence was inadmissible.
Other countries have already demonstrated how easily surveillance tools can evolve into instruments of repression.
In 2017, the BBC reported the Chinese government had begun equipping its police with surveillance sunglasses. Connected to a massive database of suspects, officers could quickly scan an entire crowd and pick out people who were flagged to be arrested. The article reported fears that future use of such a product might be used not for protection but suppression.
They were right. Authoritarian systems rely on omnipresent eyes.
In 2019, Human Rights Watch detailed how Chinese authorities used vast surveillance networks and facial recognition systems to target ethnic minorities, particularly Uyghurs, who have faced mass internment and forced labor. The group found police relied on a data-tracking app that collected personal details ranging from religious practices to blood type, flagging people for investigation over minor anomalies like unusual electricity usage. That data fed into centralized systems integrating CCTV and facial recognition.
ICE is bumbling through the streets with dangerous technology just like China. It is not yet vetted or studied by the courts of law, and it is technology that inches us ever closer towards a very imaginable future.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine the eye that tells the boot what face to stomp on — forever.