AI is a part of life for us. It’s infiltrating offices, workflows, and schools. However, specialists in immigration, tech, and law described a rapidly expanding surveillance apparatus with minimal public accountability. Powered by, you guessed it, AI. 

The “There’s nowhere left to hide” media briefing was held at the World Affairs Council, hosted by American Community Media in partnership with the San Francisco Local Media Coalition on February 27. A panel of experts discussed how technologies once associated with war zones and counterterrorism have migrated into domestic policing, mass deportation efforts and routine public surveillance.

Speakers

  • Ariel G Ruiz Soto, Senior Policy Analyst, Migration Policy Institute
  • Jacob Ward, Journalist and Author of In the Loop: How Technology is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back
  • Juan Sebastián Pinto, Storyteller in the AI Industry 

Digital Enforcement Beyond the Street

Ariel Ruiz Soto opened the discussion by highlighting the enormous scale of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said ICE is now the country’s most heavily funded law enforcement agency, backed by a $10 billion budget and an additional $75 million in 2025.

Ruiz Soto focused particular attention on the collapse of what are known as “data silos.” These are separate information systems that historically did not interact with one another. In practice, he said, that means records once considered compartmentalized or private, including tax filings, medical information and driver’s license data, are now being funneled into a centralized platform known as “Immigration OS,” built by Palantir.

Using artificial intelligence, the system can analyze patterns in a person’s life and behavior, enabling authorities to anticipate movements and carry out detentions in real time. Ruiz Soto argued that immigration enforcement has shifted away from traditional physical raids and toward what he described as “invisible online raids.” In this model, enforcement starts not with agents on the ground but with digital systems capable of locating, identifying and profiling people remotely.

Surveillance Tools With Battlefield Origins

Jacob Ward spoke about surveillance practices that, in his view, have pushed past longstanding investigative norms. He pointed to a case involving a protester who had an encounter with the New York Police Department during a No Kings rally and was later arrested at his apartment.

“The footage we had showed the Clearview AI printout that had his face and where he lived, and it literally says at the top, ‘Not to be used for suspect identification,’” said Ward, adding that this was exactly what the police department did, and with these AI tools, they’re “inventing legal strategies to provide the evidence required in court.”

Ward said the broader surveillance ecosystem also depends on ordinary household devices that consumers have embraced in the name of convenience. In his view, people have accepted a level of monitoring in private life without fully reckoning with its consequences.

“I’ve learned that I can’t speak on radio or television and say the name of a listening device that Amazon sells, because you’re turning on my Alexa. Suddenly we’ve created this panopticon repository,” Ward said.

He also described technologies that sound futuristic but, he said, are already in use. “There are already systems, one deployed by special forces, that can identify your heartbeat from 200 yards away using a laser.”

Ward said the method is highly accurate and extraordinarily difficult to escape. “You can’t leave your heart at home. You can’t cover it up or run around. There is literally nothing you can do to avoid being identified that way.”

MIT Technology Review reported on the technology in 2019, explaining that each individual’s heart generates a distinct cardiac signature, similar to a fingerprint or iris pattern, that can be used to identify them from afar. The underlying system was originally developed for the Pentagon.

Ward also warned that Wi-Fi networks can be used in ways many people do not realize. Home routers, he said, can be used to “triangulate your position and essentially create a video feed of where you are in your house, from a van parked outside,” even without cameras inside the home.

He added that a combination of Wi-Fi-based sensing and highly sensitive cameras can also defeat efforts to conceal speech. These tools can “read lips through a mask — you can’t even cover your own mouth to hide what you’re saying,” Ward added.

From Counterinsurgency to Domestic Policing

Juan Sebastián Pinto, who previously worked at Palantir, said the technologies now being used in domestic law enforcement have roots in military operations. He argued that these systems go far beyond basic data collection.

Instead, Pinto said, they are built out of “tracking technologies used in the military” and shaped by experience in “counterinsurgency.”

“The way Palantir builds social graphs and tracking mechanisms shows they were developed with intelligence agencies,” he explained.

Asked about the company’s role in Gaza and Israel, Pinto drew a direct connection between these systems and questions of power over life and death.

“Palantir was not only involved in policy in Gaza, but is now involved in the policy of who enters Gaza. I think that really underscores the problem with these technologies. They are involved in a kind of biopolitics in deciding who deserves to live, and in a necropolitics in deciding who deserves to die.”

A Warning, and an Open Question

As the event concluded, Ward said younger people often grasp the stakes of these developments more readily than older generations. He noted that advisory groups are beginning to include younger voices in conversations about artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

Whether that input will meaningfully address the concerns raised at the conference, however, remains uncertain.

 

All images courtesy of ACoM.