Tech-enabled ‘terror capitalism’ is spreading worldwide. The surveillance regimes must be stopped

Published in the Guardian Fri 24 Jul 2020

by Darren Byler and Carolina Sanchez Boe

Terror capitalism uses tools such as facial recognition to extract profits from marginalized people. Big tech and governments are collaborating

…”In the United States, immigration control measures taken in the aftermath of 9/11 have paved the way for a system that monitors and controls asylum seekers who enter the country at the southern border.

These systems use GPS tracking to control people in ways that are similar to the surveillance system in north-west China. After being held in a US detention center, a Pakistani asylum seeker named Asma was required to wear a GPS-enabled ankle monitor. (More than 32,000 foreign nationals in the US have to do the same.) Asma told us how the stigma associated with her ankle monitor pushed her into low-paid work. A food-truck owner in Austin, Texas, gave her a job because, he told her, the customers couldn’t see the monitor if she stayed behind the counter in the truck. But when the monitor started blaring, “Recharge battery! Battery low! Recharge battery! Battery low!” during her shift one day, her boss fired her. A year after Asma obtained asylum, her ankle is covered with scars from the monitor and she often feels phantom vibrations in her leg.

Ankle monitors are still prevalent, but in the past two years, US asylum seekers have also increasingly been made to submit to weekly “biometric check-ins”, through an app called SmartLink, which they are made to install on their phones. They have to keep their phones charged and GPS active at all times. Lorena, an asylum seeker who has fled violence in Guatemala, was initially relieved that her ankle monitor was removed, until she was required to give Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) access to her email account, which connects to her social media accounts.

The SmartLink app is now being used to control 21,712 immigrants. It was developed by BI Incorporated, a company that initially designed GPS ankle monitors. BI is now a subsidiary of Geo Group, one of the major prison and detention companies that have profited from a dramatic expansion of prisoner and detained populations in the US over the past four decades.”