DHS Continues To Violate Facebook Policies By Allowing CBP, ICE Officers To Create Fake Social Media Profiles
The US government may try to prosecute you for violating sites' terms of service. But it won't be handling its own actions the same way.
Instead, the government embraces fakery of all sorts, from fake colleges used to eject immigrants just trying to further their education to setting up fake drug stash houses to entrap people desperate to improve their personal financial situations. And then there's the FBI's 20 years of radicalizing people in terrorist stings where the government does all the conspiring and the terrorists" it creates do all the jail time.
While it's understood a certain amount of subterfuge is necessary to engage in law enforcement, social media services have made it clear not even the federal government is exempt from policies forbidding the creation of fake profiles. Not that it matters to the government. While it has considered this sort of behavior from mere citizens to be a criminal act, it treats willful violation of site policies as just another day at the office.
More evidence of the government's unwillingness to play by the rules. The Guardian reports the DHS's encouragement of fake profile creation by officers working for its many underlying agencies continues unabated, despite having drawn the attention of these services, along with the occasional legislator.
US immigration officials sought to expand their abilities to monitor and surveil social media activity and allowed officers to create and use fake social media profiles in a wide range of operations, including covertly researching the online presence of people seeking immigration benefits, new documents show.
Authorities within several Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration agencies, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), have repeatedly discussed using aliases", or undercover online accounts for investigations, according torecordsobtained through an open records request by the civil rights non-profit Brennan Center for Justice and shared with the Guardian. Officials have also expressed concern about social media sites' policies that prohibit the use of fake profiles and discussed bypassing those rules.
Facebook has repeatedly warned government entities that their employees are subject to the same real name" policies that apply to regular people who wish to use the service. These warnings have been constantly ignored, which is definitely the expected outcome, but one that ensures the federal government can't pretend it didn't know it was violating policies if it ever comes to the point where someone within the government is willing to do anything about these routine violations.
The documents discussed here make it clear the government will continue to violate site policies for as long as it believes it's beneficial to do so. As of now, DHS components are in the constant expansion phase of this scenario.
In August 2019, Ice's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which tracks and jails people for deportation, expressed interest in using social media for fugitive" and detainee" operations, according to emails between DHS privacy officials.
I'm mainly concerned with ERO's authority to create a fake profile and how we would get around the terms of service of certain social media providers," one DHS privacy officer wrote.
At about the same time, DHS officials wrote that the department's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) branch, which conducts criminal inquiries, was planning to soon use aliases". And one HSI policy document on social media use, written in 2012, said that undercover operations" could require investigators to befriend or become business associates with potential violators".
There's no end point in sight. Facebook will continue to remove accounts it determines to be bogus. DHS employees will continue to create fake profiles while ignoring the guidance of the DHS's own privacy officers, who obviously feel the continued abuse of site policies is likely going to end badly for the agency and its component entities.
Meanwhile, social media surveillance continues uninterrupted. The documents show CBP is still allowed to create fake profiles to passively monitor public Facebook posts. ICE can go a bit further. It has been given explicit permission to create fake accounts to engage in undercover investigations as long as the tactics used online are somewhat analogous to undercover activities carried out in the real world.
I guess that's the standard the DHS will hold itself to: if it can lie to people in person, it can lie to them online. The difference is in-person surveillance is limited to a small set of targets while online undercover efforts - combined with powerful third-party tools offered by government contractors - make placing thousands of people under surveillance so simple even a government agent can do it.