US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been increasingly scary and threatening under the Trump administration.
A few days ago, armed and masked agents converged on a Chicago apartment house, some even rappelling onto the roof from military helicopters. They forced men, women, and children outside, even naked, restraining them with zip-tie handcuffs. Most of those detained in vans, including children separated from their parents, were US citizens.
Widespread fear has motivated a number of technological solutions, including the ICEBlock app that allows users to crowdsource reports of ICE activity in their area. Pam Bondi, US attorney general, said in a statement first reported by Fox Business that Apple, at her request, had removed ICEBlock and similar apps from the app store, making it difficult to install for iPhone users.
“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so,” Fox News quoted Bondi as saying. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed.”
“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps. Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store,” Apple said in a statement quoted by the AP.
Kristi Noem, secretary of Homeland Security which oversees ICE, in July threatened to hold CNN criminally liable merely for reporting on ICEBlock, according to Politico: “We’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that, because what they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities, operations and we’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them.”
“This is an app that is publicly available to any iPhone user who wants to download it. There is nothing illegal about reporting the existence of this or any other app, nor does such reporting constitute promotion or other endorsement of the app by CNN,” a statement from the network read.
Reporting ICE activity, let alone reporting on ways to do it, seems clearly protected by First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press.
ICEBlock has been extensively criticized as untrustworthy from a security perspective, relying on Apple infrastructure to keep track of users and their locations for notification purposes.
Independent researcher Micah Flee called ICEBlock “activism theater” because the developer “makes strong claims about the security and privacy of his app without backing any of them up with technical details. Many of his claims are false. He also chose to target only iOS, and not Android, because of a misunderstanding about how Android push notifications work. And even worse, during the Q&A, he made it clear that he didn’t understand terms like ‘warrant canary,’ ‘reverse engineering,’ or ‘security through obscurity,’ which doesn’t inspire confidence.”
“ICEBlock [makes] incredibly false privacy claims for marketing. They falsely claim it provides complete anonymity when it doesn’t. They’re ignoring both data kept by Apple and data available to the server but not stored. They’re also spreading misinformation about Android,” wrote the official BlueSky account of GrapheneOS, which is the gold standard for security-conscious implementations of Android but runs only on certain recent models of Google Pixel hardware and isolates Google apps to a protected “sandbox.”
To address such problems, a number of web-only systems (that is, not using a dedicated installable app) have been made available, including ICE Watch (icewatchers.info) and ICE Tea (icetea.peoplesrebellion.org), the latter splitting “dispatch” (reporting) and “watch” (monitoring) to solve both privacy and false-positive concerns. ICE Tea makes its pitch for this approach: “Why It Matters: No app store needed – install instantly; Offline-capable (for Watch + cached UI); Looks and acts like a native app; More discreet for urgent situations.”
Even “dumb” cellular telephones necessarily reveal significant private information about their users, especially location. For many years, to assist 911 callers the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has required all new cellular devices in the US to be able to compute and report their location based on GPS signals. Soon, cellular networks must be able to use such automatically transmitted location information to route 911 calls to the appropriate dispatch center. Even the oldest and simplest cellular devices must be constantly located by the network in order to perform the most basic tasks such as incoming calls ringing.
If someone is worried about running afoul of the law by reporting ICE activity, probably their best bet would be a pre-paid “burner phone,” a cheap and disposable cellular device that would be difficult to trace to its user. Even then, there are no guarantees.
[And yes, Ms. Noem, if you’d like to come after us for reporting on this, bring it on! – Ed.]
If you’re interested in helping track suspected ICE activity, RI has its own hotline and network, which is independent of any of the apps mentioned above. You can call them at 401-675-1414 or learn more at Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (amorri.org).