“Catch and Revoke”: AI-Driven State Dept. Program Targets Pro-Palestinian Students & Visa Holders
We speak with the Brennan Center’s Faiza Patel, who warns the Trump administration is ramping up efforts to target international students and other visitors and immigrants to the United States over pro-Palestinian speech. The State Department has reportedly launched a new effort using artificial intelligence to help identify and revoke visas for people the government deems to be supporting U.S.-designated terrorist groups, based primarily on the individuals’ social media accounts. “Foreign students are running scared,” says Patel. She also notes that while “AI-driven sounds really fancy,” the process is more likely to be a basic keyword search prone to “rudimentary mistakes.”
I mentioned social media scraping in a previous post.
I don't think these critics have a handle on how bad it really is. So, something I wrote before...
The terrorist designation puts in motion unconstitutional/extra-constitutional features such as warrantless actions implemented by the USA PATRIOT Act. So, the AG has to report later on to a congressional committee in secret all the warrantless anti-terrorist actions or a count of them they have done. But there is no accountability since the AG can simply never report it, no check by another branch for it. The warrantless searches are back-approved by the committee or at least they nod their heads yes (in private) to a summary report.
This to me means that the govt is not merely looking at public profiles on social media, but scraping private social media photos, posts, messages, friend networks, possibly even smartphone activity.
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