Spencer Woodman | The Verge

ICE detainees are asking to be put in solitary confinement for their own safety

2017-03-10T12:02:53-05:00

LUMPKIN, GA - MAY 4: Detainees at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. are escorted through a corridor. | Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Last week it was reported that the Trump administration is eyeing a major expansion of detention facilities for many of the immigrants Trump hopes to deport. The move underscores an often-overlooked reality of Trump’s signature campaign promise: before immigrants are actually expelled from the country, they are generally detained — sometimes for years — as they are processed or as their cases are reviewed. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts out many of its detention facilities to private prison corporations like CoreCivic — formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) — and the GEO Group, which have seen significant increases in their stock prices since Donald Trump’s election.

Hundreds of logs obtained by The Verge through a Freedom of Information Act Request detailing the use of solitary confinement at three of these privately run ICE facilities provide a window into the conditions of desperation and violence that immigrants, including those diagnosed with mental illness, can face inside such detention centers. The logs show that life inside the facilities can be so dangerous and hostile that numerous detainees have voluntarily admitted themselves to solitary confinement just to seek refuge from the general population. In other cases documented in the logs, detainees were disciplined with isolation for perpetrating acts of violence, sexual assault, or disruption; yet others were placed in solitary for more minor infractions, such as charging detainees for haircuts or “horse-playing.” In dozens of instances at a Georgia facility, detainees were placed in solitary confinement for hunger striking; in one case, an detainee with a mental illness was placed in isolation at the request of ICE for reasons that facility officials writing the log readily admitted they did not understand.

Before immigrants are expelled from the country, they are generally detained — sometimes for years

Encompassing the entirety of 2016, the logs cover two CoreCivic facilities in Lumpkin, Georgia; Eloy, Arizona; and a third center in Pearsall, Texas, operated by the GEO Group.

The logs were generated for ICE headquarters to detail two categories of detainees: those placed in isolation for more than two weeks, and those who had a range of “special vulnerabilities,” including physical or mental health diagnoses, detainees who had been the victims of sexual assault or those at risk for suicide. In total, the logs list more than 300 instances of this sort of confinement being used last year at the three facilities, with the Lumpkin facility deploying the use of this confinement at a significantly higher rate than the other two detention centers.

In September 2013, the Obama administration issued a directive to ICE seeking to both rein in the agency’s use of solitary confinement and to overhaul its record keeping of the practice, which requires the sort of logs this story cites to be routinely submitted to ICE headquarters. “Placement of detainees in segregated housing is a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives,” the directive states. “In particular, placement in administrative segregation due to a special vulnerability should be used only as a last resort and when no other viable housing options exist.”

Life in the facilities can be so dangerous that detainees voluntarily admit themselves to solitary

Across the three facilities, more than 160 entries address detainees with mental illnesses being placed in isolation, a form of captivity that human rights groups say can amount to torture. Mary Small, the policy director of Detention Watch Network, a group that works to expose and confront problems in US immigration detention facilities, expressed alarm over the recurring use of solitary confinement on detainees with mental illnesses documented in the logs.

“Solitary confinement can be traumatic for anyone but is particularly traumatic for certain groups of people,” said Small. “So to see that even after the implementation of the directive the large number of people who are documented to have mental health issues for whom solitary confinement is being used as way to manage that is really concerning.”

In some of these cases, logs describe detainees who appear in obvious need of psychiatric help being put in isolation for long periods. One log reads that, on June 8th, 2016, CoreCivic staff placed a detainee in isolation for “standing up on his open bay bed and urinating in a cup followed by [the detainee] drinking the same urine.” CoreCivic, with ICE’s blessing, placed this detainee in solitary confinement for nearly a month not for mental health treatment but to discipline him for drinking his urine. The detainee had no attorney to represent him in this disciplinary action, the logs state.

More than 160 entries address detainees with mental illnesses being placed in isolation

In another case at Lumpkin, a mentally ill detainee was placed in disciplinary isolation because he refused “to be housed in his assigned living area because he says that he is hurting and wants to see medical, medical did see the detainee and done all that they could for the detainee.”

In a case at the Texas facility, GEO Group placed a female detainee with mental illness in punitive isolation for two weeks for “making inappropriate comments to a GEO Officer while in the dormitory.”

The logs contain indications of things being particularly amiss at the Lumpkin facility. As The Verge documented last week, CoreCivic placed dozens of detainees in solitary confinement for hunger striking at the facility in 2016 alone. Additional logs show that CoreCivic’s facilities at Lumpkin were over capacity, causing detainees to be placed in solitary simply because there was no room elsewhere. Two logs state that CoreCivic had placed detainees in isolation simply because its medical unit had no room to house people requiring medical attention.

One entry from Lumpkin expresses confusion about why a detainee was placed in solitary confinement to begin with. In this case, ICE’s Health Services Corps had instructed CoreCivic to place a detainee with a mental health diagnosis in its isolation unit for medical observation. “Awaiting IHSC to advise why, specifically, [detainee] was placed under medical observation,” the log reads. “After repeated requests for information, IHSC did not respond.” CoreCivic released the detainee from solitary the day after he was admitted.

CoreCivic placed detainees in isolation simply because its medical unit had no room

In response to questions from The Verge, CoreCivic and GEO Group provided general responses asserting that their services provide safe and humane environments for their detainees in accordance with federal detention standards, to which, as CoreCivic said, “ICE holds us accountable through direct, daily oversight.” ICE did not respond to a list of emailed questions regarding this story.

In response to questions from The Verge about the CoreCivic and GEO Group facilities, an ICE spokesperson said that the agency’s detention practices “maximizes access to counsel and visitation, promotes recreation, improves conditions of confinement and ensures quality medical, mental health and dental care.” The agency also noted that it uses a variety of facilities — owned by ICE or other parties, such as local governments or private companies — “to meet the agency’s detention needs while achieving the highest possible cost savings for the taxpayer.”

More than a dozen logs referencing alleged violations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) at both GEO Group and CoreCivic facilities provide a grim reminder of the dangers that immigrants can face when sent into ICE detention. One detainee at the Lumpkin facility requested to be placed in solitary confinement as a protective measure for at least 12 days after reporting a PREA violation. In another instance, at the GEO Group’s Texas facility, a detainee was kept in solitary confinement for 30 days after he was accused of being the aggressor in two separate PREA violations — one of which was against a detainee he had shared a dormitory with. Prison officials found the detainee guilty of “making sexual proposals or threats” and “engaging in sexual acts.”

“He does not want to be shanked and leave the facility in a body bag."

Across the three facilities, logs repeatedly describe detainees seeking shelter in solitary confinement from a range of other dangers from the general population.

In October, a detainee who identified as being gay asked CoreCivic to lock him in solitary confinement to escape anti-gay taunting in the Lumpkin facility’s general population. On November 24th, a detainee with a mental health diagnosis was admitted to isolation after “stating that he did not want to be housed in the general population because the detainees make fun of him due to his mental health status.” The detainee was held in solitary for at least a month, although the full duration is unclear because, as the log notes, “the contractor operating the detention facility did not provide their report in due time.”

Also recurring throughout the three facilities are references to detainees requesting to be placed in isolation for fear of falling prey to gang violence.

Just two days after Donald Trump won the presidency on a promise of ramping up ICE’s capabilities, an immigrant detainee at Lumpkin, believing he may become a target of the “MS 13 and Sureno” gangs, asked to be placed protective isolation, where he stayed for nearly a month.

“He feels that some of the detainees who are gang members give him weird looks,” the log states, “and he does not want to be shanked and leave the facility in a body bag.”

Logs obtained by The Verge through a Freedom of Information Act Request detail ICE’s use of solitary confinement in 2016 on certain detainees at thee private facilities in Lumpkin, Georgia; Eloy, Arizona; and Pearsall, Texas.

Spencer Woodman is a 2017 John Jay / H.F. Guggenheim Reporting Fellow.

Exclusive: ICE put detained immigrants in solitary confinement for hunger striking

2017-02-27T09:33:55-05:00

LUMPKIN, GA - MAY 4: The Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. | Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Beginning last April, and picking up in the weeks following the November election, dozens of detainees at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in rural Georgia went on hunger strike in protest of their detention. The private prison corporation that runs the facility, CoreCivic — formerly Corrections Corporation of America — responded swiftly to the expanding demonstration: as immigrant detainees refused to eat, CoreCivic staff began immediately locking them in solitary confinement for their participation in the non-violent protest.

According to ICE detainment logs obtained by The Verge through a Freedom of Information Act request, more than two dozen detainees were put in solitary confinement for hunger striking — some simply for declaring they would refuse to eat, even if they hadn’t yet skipped a meal. The logs also show that CoreCivic may have attempted to gather information on hunger strike organizers through cultivating detainee informants, who were later locked in solitary confinement themselves for protection.

Key Findings

Dozens of immigrant detainees were locked in solitary confinement after going on hunger strike
Immigrants were simply demanding to have access to their deportation officers
ICE has previously been accused of using solitary confinement to punish hunger strikes
Private prison firms like CoreCivic are set to benefit from President Trump’s policies

The logs indicate that many of the detainees were protesting their detention and lack of access to any administrative recourse through ICE. “I just want to be deported,” one hunger-striking detainee in solitary confinement told guards in November. Another log reads: “The detainee states he will not eat until he is seen by ICE.” One particularly troubling set of logs generated late last November show that several detainees had gone on strike for the exact same reason: “Detainee stated that he will not eat until he can see his Deportation Officer.” These detainees were immediately locked in solitary confinement upon announcing their refusal to eat. In many cases throughout the logs, CoreCivic states that hunger striking detainees had been placed in isolation for “medical observation.”

CoreCivic’s solitary confinement logs provide a window into the unforgiving conditions inside a network of privately run ICE detention centers that Barack Obama presided over, expanded, and then handed to President Trump last month. It is in these facilities that new waves of detainees will find themselves locked as a result of Trump’s pledge to rapidly deport millions of immigrants. Last week, it was reported that President Trump had directed his administration to take steps to dramatically expand the sorts of immigrants whom ICE could detain and deport. In response to actions like these, the stock prices of for-profit prison operators like CoreCivic have significantly risen since Trump’s victory in November.

As immigrant detainees refused to eat, CoreCivic staff began locking them in solitary confinement

The solitary confinement cases outlined in the records obtained by The Verge took place at the Stewart Detention Center, a facility managed by CoreCivic outside Lumpkin, Georgia. The Lumpkin facility has been the subject of past allegations of inhumane treatment of immigrant detainees, who can be kept behind bars for years awaiting resolution of their deportation cases.

In April, it was reported that two detainees at Lumpkin had gone on hunger strike to protest their prolonged detention. The detainment logs obtained by The Verge do not specifically address the April incidents but show that, shortly thereafter, detainees at the facility launched a previously unreported series of hunger strikes that spanned months.

ICE has been previously accused of using solitary confinement to retaliate against hunger-striking detainees at other facilities. In comments to The Verge, ICE sent its detention standards stating that hunger-striking detainees should be put in isolation when “medically advisable.” In at least a half-dozen cases, detainees were placed in solitary confinement immediately after having declared hunger strike, although they hadn’t yet had an opportunity to miss a single meal. In most logs, detainees relented and began eating again after less than a week locked in solitary confinement — a form of captivity that human rights groups say can amount to psychological torture.

“I just want to be deported.”

The ICE logs detail the Lumpkin facility’s use of “segregation,” a term that corrections officials use to describe scenarios in which detainees are kept in single-person cells with tightly limited human contact for the overwhelming portion of each day. This practice is known to the general public as solitary confinement. Since, 2013 ICE has been under a directive that imposes stronger oversight of its use, calling the practice “a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives.” The Lumpkin segregation logs obtained by The Verge were recently submitted to ICE headquarters in accordance with this 2013 directive.

“These documents confirm what we’ve been hearing in terms of immediate and really brutal crackdowns by using solitary as a means of deterring the hunger strikes and almost as a punishment,” Azadeh Shahshahani, an attorney with the Atlanta-based social justice group Project South, said of the Lumpkin facility. Shahshahani says that the facility responded to detainee demonstrations in 2014 and 2015 by using what she views as excessive force, including placing detainees in solitary confinement.

The logs obtained by the Verge, which span the entirety of 2016, detail a variety of reasons relating to the hunger strike for placing detainees in solitary confinement. In late December, CoreCivic locked a group of detainees in solitary confinement for terms of 60 days because surveillance footage allegedly showed them “being involved in initiating a group demonstration, encouraging others to go on a hunger strike and refusing to lock down for count,” according to the logs. One detainee went on hunger strike after CoreCivic locked him in isolation while it investigated allegations that he was “charging detainees for haircuts as he is a barber.”

“The detainee states he will not eat until he is seen by ICE.”

The logs indicate that CoreCivic may have attempted to cultivate detainee informants to help gather information about the hunger strike. The entries state that detainees were placed in solitary confinement as a protective measure after other detainees had identified them as serving as “snitches” for CoreCivic personnel seeking to gather information on the demonstrations.

“This incident involved the above listed detainee believing to have been a snitch in the hunger strike incident which occurred in unit 6,” one log reads. “The unit team received a message that Detainee […] would be physically assaulted due his alleged cooperation with the unit staff.”

In comments to The Verge, CoreCivic spokesperson Steve Owen said that detainees had not been punished for hunger striking. No “detainees at the Stewart facility have been placed in restrictive housing in retaliation for hunger strikes,” Owen said in an email. “Providing a safe, humane and appropriate environment for those entrusted to our care is our top priority, and we work in close coordination with our partners at ICE to ensure the wellbeing of the detainees at the Stewart Detention Center.”

Human rights groups say solitary confinement can amount to psychological torture

In at least 30 cases, the logs list “hunger strike” as CoreCivic’s primary reason for placing striking detainees in solitary confinement. In addition to allowing isolation of hunger striking detainees when “medically necessary,” ICE’s guidelines allow detainees to be locked down to preserve the order of a facility.

Daniel B. Vasquez, a former warden of San Quentin State Prison, where he oversaw a large bloc containing more than a thousand solitary confinement cells, told The Verge that it is necessary to isolate hunger strikers from the general population. “If a person has declared a hunger strike, you have to isolate them in administrative segregation and monitor them on a medical basis,” Vasquez said. He added that it is also possible to punish such detainees by issuing an order to eat that detainees continuing to strike would defy. “So then I issue you a violation report for refusing orders.”

The logs make clear that, in some cases, ICE had ordered CoreCivic to place detainees in solitary confinement for hunger striking. Several of the ICE logs state that ICE officials within the agency’s Health Services Corps had ordered striking detainees to be kept in segregated housing for medical monitoring, although most of the logs do not specify ICE’s specific involvement.

ICE has been accused of using solitary confinement to punish hunger striking

Citing medical privacy laws, ICE declined to comment on any cases of hunger strikers being placed in solitary confinement at Lumpkin. Pointing to various offices that provide oversight of the use of solitary confinement for ICE detainees, an agency spokesperson said that “ICE provides several levels of oversight in order to ensure that detainees in ICE custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments and under appropriate conditions of confinement.”

CoreCivic’s Owen also challenged The Verge’s use of language. “It’s also important to note that restrictive housing is not ‘solitary confinement,” Owen said. “We do not have the latter at our facilities.”

CoreCivic emphasized that detainees locked in Stewart’s “restrictive housing” units have the same access to visitation, telephone time, law library, mail, and barber shop as general-population detainees, and are given one hour of recreation time per day. The detainees “continue to have daily interaction facility staff, including medical professionals, chaplains, and ICE officials,” Owen said of CoreCivic’s restrictive housing.

CoreCivic’s preferred term of “restrictive housing” is correctional industry language for what is generally known as “solitary confinement,” according to the Department of Justice. The term “solitary confinement” has fallen out of favor within the correctional sector “in part because it conjures a specific, and in some cases misleading, image of the practice,” according to the Justice Department. “Not all segregation is truly ‘solitary,’ at least in the traditional sense of the word.”

Vasquez agrees, calling the term imprecise and “a word that doesn’t really exist any longer.”

Stock prices of prison operators like CoreCivic have risen since Trump’s victory

Craig Haney, an expert on solitary confinement at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that CoreCivc’s description of its restrictive housing at Stewart seemed to be simply a description of conditions generally referred to as “solitary confinement.” “The fact that they get things like haircuts and mail, and must have routine contact with staff,” Haney said, “does not change the nature of the experience.”

Solitary confinement has been repeatedly found to exact a lasting psychological toll. It is common for prisoners who are locked in solitary confinement in the United States to be kept in their cells 23 hours a day and given one hour of recreation per day. At Lumpkin, CoreCivic limited opportunities to go outdoors for some of the hunger-striking detainees. “As a precaution,” several logs stated, “outdoor recreation will be suspended for the duration of their strike.”

ICE has previously been accused of using solitary confinement to punish detainees who hunger strike. In Washington state, after ICE reportedly locked some 20 detainees in solitary confinement during a hunger strike, the state’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union sued, alleging that the state had infringed on the prisoner’s First Amendment rights. A judge ordered ICE to release the detainees.

The Lumpkin facility has been deemed a “black hole” of the US immigration system

Located more than a two-hour drive from Atlanta — home to the closest regional ICE Enforcement and Removal Office and many of the state’s attorneys that would represent immigrants — the Lumpkin facility, has been deemed a “black hole” of the US immigration system where unrepresented detainees can languish for years in harsh conditions. A report published last year by the American Immigration Council stated that only 6 percent of detained immigrants at Lumpkin had representation from an attorney.

Shahshahani, who has been involved with efforts to close the Lumpkin facility for years, says that the facility also saw hunger strikes in both 2014 and 2015. At issue, she says, where both facility conditions — documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others — and long periods of detention even for detainees who said they would rather be deported than stay in the facility.

Noting that it can take an entire day for a lawyer or advocate to travel from Atlanta to the Lumpkin detention center for a meeting, Shahshahani says that the facility’s remote location compounds detainees’ feeling of helplessness.

“It goes back to this same issue of isolation at the facility,” said Shahshahani. “Immigrants at the facility feel that they don’t have anyone representing them.”

Logs obtained by The Verge detail ICE’s use of solitary confinement on hunger striking detainees at a private facility in Georgia. Entries not relating to the hunger strike have been removed from the spreadsheet. In some cases, The Verge could not determine whether multiple, similar entries represented different detainees or duplicate logs. The numbers cited in the story are based on a conservative assessment of potential duplicate entries.

Despite their liberal politics, Connecticut and California are sharing immigrant data with ICE

2017-02-22T11:31:48-05:00

On September 22nd, 2016, the federal government’s Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO) — a subset of ICE and the country’s primary deportation force — published a disclosure regarding a deal it was securing with the state of Connecticut to allow ICE officials to access the state’s police database. In the filing, the immigration agency was blunt in addressing the critical importance of the state data to ICE’s deportation officers.

“[W]ithout access to the system, ICE officers will not be able to locate and track illegal aliens,” the document reads. “No other organization maintains data necessary to complete this task efficiently but the State of Connecticut’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection.”

Connecticut’s law enforcement database is one of many state and local data systems across the country that play an important role in federal immigration authorities’ efforts to track and deport immigrants. Now that President Trump has taken the first steps toward fulfilling his promise of deporting millions of immigrants, such data-sharing arrangements, which have long been taken for granted, are coming under heightened scrutiny. Connecticut’s agreement, according to the funding document obtained by The Verge, aims to run until 2021 — through the entire first term of Trump’s presidency.

“Without access to the system, ICE officers will not be able to locate and track illegal aliens.”

The case of Connecticut illustrates how deeply entangled these relationships have become. The state’s governor, Dannel Malloy, has gained a reputation for being one of the most pro-immigrant governors in the nation. In 2013, Malloy championed and signed the Trust Act, which limits ability of law enforcement in the state to comply with ICE requests to detain and hand over immigrants. Yet at the same time, Malloy’s state is sharing troves of information with ICE’s deportation force. Known as the Connecticut On-Line Law Enforcement Communications Teleprocessing system, or COLLECT, the police database gives its users access to state DMV data, court data, probation information, protective orders, boating certifications, hunting and fishing licenses, and other data.

This has distressed immigration advocates. Alok Bhatt, an activist with the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance, expressed exasperation over Connecticut allowing ICE to use its police database.

“Connecticut’s compliance with ICE’s request crystallizes the State’s complicity in destabilizing families and communities,” Bhatt said in an email after reviewing the ICE funding document. “Armed with this information, activists and advocates must strategize around and against these realities, and make our communities aware of the nature of this threat.”

“Connecticut's compliance with ICE's request crystallizes the State's complicity in destabilizing families.”

The Verge asked Malloy for comment regarding his state’s role in providing data to ICE. A spokesperson for Malloy did not directly address the governor’s plans for COLLECT but said that Malloy “has met with a number of immigrant groups since President Trump took office and is working on additional avenues to ensure that the rights of all residents are protected – regardless of immigration status.” The office also underscored Malloy’s past and current advocacy for immigrants in the state. Malloy’s office also pointed the routine importance of data-sharing relating to COLLECT and emphasized that a function of COLLECT is to provide law enforcement access to an FBI database of national crime data.

“The COLLECT database is a shared database among local, state and federal agencies and is essential to protecting the residents of our state,” said Malloy spokesperson Chris Collibee in an email. “Every state participates in the sharing of information with other law enforcement agencies, including federal authorities.”

While much of the local law enforcement data that ICE uses is first given to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, ICE clearly prizes its direct access to state databases like COLLECT, which contains data not available in NCIC.

ICE clearly prizes its direct access to state databases like COLLECT

Michael J. Wishnie, a clinical law professor at Yale, has been looking into ICE’s use of COLLECT for years and has discussed the partnership with state officials.

“I think there’s a lot of information in COLLECT that’s not in NCIC,” said Wishnie. “To date, the state of Connecticut has not to my knowledge attempted to renegotiate — for instance to secure stronger protections for the use of state criminal records against immigration enforcement. It’s a two-party contract. They can renegotiate terms on the face of the agreement.”

Bhatt says that, even though the Trust Act limits the extent to which local authorities can physically hold an immigrant for potential removal by ICE, he has seen anecdotal evidence that the law can be circumvented by federal authorities who have extensive knowledge of goings-on in the state’s criminal justice system. By simply knowing when a targeted immigrant has a mandatory engagement with local or state law enforcement, Bhatt says, federal agents can locate and apprehend a subject. For instance ICE officials have shown up at jails to apprehend an immigrant they know is about to be released, says Bhatt, or federal agents will interdict immigrants on probation at mandatory meetings with parole officers or at court-ordered alcohol classes.

State court schedules are one category of information Wishnie thinks ICE is gaining access to through COLLECT. “We don’t have good data on this, but, anecdotally, ICE has been more present at state courthouses,” said Wishnie, “and I believe that they’re using COLLECT to identify people that are coming in for hearings.”

Connecticut is not the only state that has a long-standing information-sharing partnership with ICE that is now becoming more controversial in the Trump era. In recent years, the state of California has actively shared data with ICE via a database of suspected gang networks called CalGangs. Critics have alleged that the state system often contains inaccurate information that can cause immigrants who have no real gang affiliation to become swept up into ICE’s deportation proceedings.

While ICE’s collaboration with states across the country has been a largely murky subject, a 2010 disclosure by the Department of Homeland Security stated plainly that the immigration agency hopes to expand the exchange of gang affiliation information like that of CalGangs. “In the future, ICE anticipates accessing gang data from a variety of state and local law enforcement agencies,” the 2010 disclosure states, “via its existing connection to CalGangs.”

ICE officials have shown up at jails to apprehend an immigrant they know is about to be released

According to Adam Schwartz a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the CalGangs database is only one of multiple systems in California that he worries Trump’s immigration authorities could tap while carrying out a program of mass deportation.

As an example, Schwartz points to the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS), a clearinghouse of state police information that connects to an array of other data systems held by law enforcement agencies, departments of motor vehicles, and other state offices. It’s unclear whether ICE has a direct portal into CLETS, but according to an August 2016 Department of Homeland Security disclosure, California allows CLETS data to be accessed by US Customs and Border Protection to supplement an intelligence system that the agency allows ICE to access.

“CLETS is a system that was created to facilitate criminal law enforcement in California, and we object to taking a database that was created for that purpose — for public safety, keeping people safe from crime — and transferring it over to a purpose for which it wasn’t created,” said Schwartz, whose group is supporting a bill pending in the state legislature to ban state law enforcement from sharing data with federal immigration authorities. “I cannot predict exactly what will happen after the enactment of this law but we would hope that ICE would not have access to databases like CLETS.”

For California, Connecticut, and other states, Wishnie says that politicians in the states likely have the ability to block this data from ICE. This could include, Wishnie says, categories of local law enforcement information that is first given to the FBI and then passed along to ICE.

“I believe they could say to the FBI: ‘Okay we signed this years ago but now you’re sharing fingerprints with ICE,'” Wishnie said. “‘We want to renegotiate the terms of our data-sharing.'”

An ICE contracting document details the agency’s need to access Connecticut’s law enforcement database.

_JOFOC__HSCEDM-16-P-00096_-FBO (2) (1) by Frank Bi on Scribd

Spencer Woodman is a 2017 John Jay / H.F. Guggenheim Reporting Fellow

On the record: we asked all 50 governor offices if they’d share immigration data with Trump administration

2017-02-10T08:04:23-05:00

Last week, a leaked draft of an executive order from the Trump administration indicated that the administration might seek to deport undocumented immigrants determined to be a “public charge” — defined as someone who relies on certain federal, state, or local public assistance programs. This could mark a first step by the administration toward fulfilling president Trump’s pledge to rapidly deport millions of immigrants. Now activists and some officials across the country are scrambling to find ways that state governments can protect their undocumented residents.

For years, data sharing arrangements between state and federal agencies in charge of tracking, apprehending, and deporting immigrants have gone largely unnoticed. Some data systems, such as DMV information and police databases, are known to share data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In addition to these, state agencies such as public benefit administrators also possess volumes of personal information that could be of potential use to federal authorities. Under the Trump administration, such arrangements, or even potential arrangements, are coming under increasing scrutiny.

The Verge reached out to all 50 state governor offices to ask whether they’d share immigration data with the federal government. Here are their responses.

Alabama: Governor Robert Bentley’s office said simply: “The Governor is looking forward to working with the Trump administration.”

California: A spokesperson for Governor Jerry Brown said that there were state privacy protections already in place, but said that “the administration is actively monitoring these issues and many others across state government.” Brown’s office declined to comment on the state’s pending legislation to block state data from immigration officials.

Colorado: A spokesperson for John Hickenlooper told The Verge she had “nothing to report.”

Connecticut: Governor Dannel Malloy’s office underscored steps the state had taken under the 2013 TRUST Act to limit local law enforcement from handing over detained undocumented immigrants to federal authorities and said of its state law-enforcement database: “Every state participates in the sharing of information with other law enforcement agencies, including federal authorities.”

Delaware: A spokesperson for Governor John Carney said “I don’t have details of a specific plan for you” and shared a statement by the governor condemning President Trump’s travel ban.

Hawaii: The office of Governor David Ige sent The Verge a press release condemning President Trump’s executive orders.

Massachusetts: A spokesperson for Governor Charlie Baker sent The Verge a press release in which Governor Baker condemns President Trump’s travel ban.

Michigan: A spokesperson for Governor Rick Snyder said “We receive our immigration data from the federal government, and Michigan does not collect or keep data on the religious affiliation of residents,” and did not respond to a follow-up question about additional categories of data.

Minnesota: A spokesperson for Mark Dayton sent a statement from the governor criticizing President Trump’s executive orders and stating: “I will uphold my sworn oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Minnesota,’ and do everything possible to ensure that every Minnesotan is treated lawfully and fairly.”

Nevada: A spokesperson for Governor Brian Sandoval took issue with the premise of The Verge‘s question regarding concerns over the potential building of a Muslim registry and did not answer The Verge‘s question about immigration data.

New York: A spokesperson for Governor Andrew Cuomo pointed to a policy forbidding state agencies from asking about immigration status or divulging such information, unless required by law, and indicated that New York state agencies keep no information that would be useful to Trump’s immigration authorities.

Oregon: Last week, after Governor Kate Brown issued an executive order decreeing that no state resources be used to build a Muslim registry. Her staff told The Verge that “Brown is exploring further ways to protect Oregonians against” policies that are “not in line with our state’s values.” Her office also pointed to a recent order by the governor mandating an overhaul to the state’s cyber security to protect it from outside attackers.

Vermont: A spokesperson for Governor Phil Scott told The Verge that the governor is aware of concerns about President Trump’s deportation officials potentially using Vermont’s data and said that he is convening a panel to discuss the issues and assess state policy under Trump.

Washington: The general counsel of Governor Jay Inslee told The Verge that the governor has ordered a review of data held by a handful of public benefits administrators in the state to assess whether they have data that could be utilized by Trump’s deportation officials, and how, if possible, to shield such data from the new administration.

Wyoming: A spokesperson for Governor Matt Mead said “Wyoming does not have a refugee program so we do not have any information to share,” and did not respond to a follow-up question seeking clarification.

Utah: A spokesperson for Utah Governor Gary Herbert said that “as of now Governor Herbert doesn’t intend to take action on this.”

States that did not respond: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin

Over the past week, The Verge has asked the governors of all 50 states as well as dozens of state legislators whether they are taking steps — or at least examining steps that might be taken — to shield data from Trump’s immigration officials or any agency seeking to build a Muslim registry. In all, only governors from three states provided The Verge with an indication that they would actively look into taking such measures: Washington, Oregon, and Vermont. The remaining 47 state governors either expressed support for Trump’s policy pledges, provided vague responses, or refused to respond.

In Washington state, which has taken a leading role in opposing President Trump’s controversial travel ban executive order, Governor Jay Inslee has ordered his policy and legal staff to conduct a review of data held by selected government agencies and determine whether any data useful to Trump’s deportation force could be shielded from the new administration.

Meanwhile, legislators in New York, Washington state, California, and Massachusetts have proposed laws to hide state data from the Trump administration. Last week Oregon governor Kate Brown issued a directive ordering that no state resources be used to create a Muslim registry. In response to The Verge’s questions about any additional steps being looked at to keep Oregon’s data away from the Trump administration, Brown’s office said that Governor “Brown is exploring further ways to protect Oregonians against polices [sic] that are not in line with our state’s values” and also pointed to a recent order by the governor to overhaul the state’s cyber security from outside attackers.

Only one Republican office contacted by The Verge indicated that it would look at potential steps to hide state data from the administration. Last week, Vermont’s Republican governor Phil Scott issued a press release criticizing President Trump’s travel ban and calling for the convening of a “civil rights and criminal justice” panel to examine ways the state could address the new political situation. Governor Scott’s spokesperson told The Verge that he is aware of concerns of deportation officials potentially using Vermont’s data, and said that the special panel would take up the issue.

The vast majority of states, including those with prominent Democratic governors, did not respond substantively to The Verge’s questions. When asked about any measures under examination to protect state data from Trump’s deportation officials or any agency seeking to build a Muslim registry, a spokesperson for Colorado Democratic governor John Hickenlooper said the office had “nothing to report right now.” The Democratic governors of North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Montana provided no responses to The Verge’s questions. Executive branch staff in Minnesota, Hawaii, and Delaware supplied vague answers, mostly containing statements condemning Trump’s recent executive orders in categorical terms. California governor Jerry Brown’s office said that “the administration is actively monitoring these issues.” And a spokesperson for New York governor Andrew Cuomo pointed to a policy forbidding state agencies from asking about immigration status and indicated that New York state agencies keep no information that would be useful to Trump’s immigration authorities.

Only a handful of states under Republican control responded to The Verge’s questions. When asked about the use of state data for mass deportations or the potential building of a Muslim registry, a spokesperson for Alabama Republican governor Robert Bentley stated flatly: “The Governor is looking forward to working with the Trump administration.”

A spokesperson for Nevada’s moderate Republican governor Brian Sandoval appeared to take a dismissive attitude toward concerns that the new administration might seek to build a Muslim registry — a promise Trump made during the Republican primary.

“[Has] there been a proposal in the past 12 months or since he’s taken office?” asked Sandoval spokesperson Mari St. Martin in an email, referring to President Trump. “I’m not sure we’re going to respond to everything he’s proposed without a policy proposal now that he’s in office.”

Though St. Martin is correct that Trump himself has not pledged to build such a registry since he has taken office, privacy advocates consider a wide variety of data collection to be a real concern under Trump.

“We’re very anxious that the federal government in pursuit of undocumented immigrants is going to data-mine,” said Adam Schwartz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group, “that they’re going to go after databases held by everyone including state and local government.”

In New York state, some Republicans have already taken steps to ensure that federal authorities do have robust access to government data. In December, two Republican state lawmakers filed a lawsuit against New York City after Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a plan to delete a database of personal information relating to municipal IDs that had been marketed to undocumented immigrants.

A separate Republican lawmaker in New York state last month reportedly proposed a bill to require both public and privately run universities in the state to collect certain data on the nationality and number of foreign-born students enrolled in educational programs, although the bill stipulates the state would not collect personally identifying information on such students.

New York State Assembly member Dean Murray said efforts to limit the collection of immigration data would impede the mission of law enforcement.

“We pass laws for a reason — we pass laws to protect the public. Now we’re asking our local law enforcement to just completely ignore some of those laws,” he told Politico. “That’s a problem. This is a matter of law. We need to allow law enforcement to work together to enforce all laws.”

States move to protect their immigration data from the Trump administration

2017-02-02T10:33:35-05:00

In the days after Donald Trump won November’s presidential election, immigration and civil liberties advocates began assessing how the new president might carry out his promises to create a registry of Muslims and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Almost immediately, it became clear the Trump administration would need data, and a lot of it, in order to not only peg people’s religious affiliation and immigration status but also allow federal agents to verify their identities and track their whereabouts. Information that could be used for such purposes is collected and stored by a variety of state agencies that issue driver’s licenses, dispense public assistance, and enforce laws.

On The Record
This piece is part of an ongoing series in which The Verge asks state officials where they stand on sharing immigration data with the federal administration.

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Just three days after the election, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio made headlines by proposing a plan to keep data out of Trump’s hands by deleting information contained in a database of municipal ID cards that had been marketed to undocumented immigrants in the city.

Now, in the first weeks of the Trump’s presidency, the battle over the federal government’s access to locally held data has gone national.

In Washington state, The Verge has learned, Democratic governor Jay Inslee has directed members of his policy and legal staff to work with a handful of state agencies to identify data that could be utilized by Trump’s deportation officials, and how, if possible, to shield any such information from federal authorities engaging in mass deportation. In California and New York, Democratic lawmakers have proposed legislation to block state data from federal immigration authorities. Democratic legislators have also proposed bills in Washington state, California, New York, and Massachusetts that would prevent state data from being used by federal authorities to build a registry of people belonging to a certain religion.

The battle over the federal government’s access to data has gone national

And it’s not only Democrats who are contemplating how to handle state data under Trump. On Monday, Vermont’s Republican governor Phil Scott condemned President Trump’s recent immigration order and called for the convening of a “civil rights and criminal justice” task force to identify state and federal laws Trump’s orders might be breaking and to recommend any action the state can take. A spokesperson for the governor told The Verge that Governor Scott is aware of concerns over the state’s data being potentially shared with Trump’s immigration officials and says that the governor’s civil rights task force would discuss the matter.

The Verge is reaching out to governors and legislators across the country to ask what, if anything, they’re doing to keep their data from being used for mass deportation or the building of a muslim registry. This story is the first in a series, which we will update as more states confirm or deny plans to block federal access to databases that could be used for deportation or registries.

The efforts could lead to a showdown between state and federal authorities

The efforts that are emerging could lead to a showdown between state and federal authorities, who may require state data to fulfill the Trump administration’s agenda. Data gleaned from state agencies can be an important component of carrying out the federal government’s deportation program, says Anil Kalhan, a law professor at Drexel University who has extensively studied surveillance systems related to immigration enforcement.

“The reason why federal authorities want to access information from state and local officials is because their personnel and resources are limited,” says Kalhan. “The logic of doing this is that it essentially creates border checkpoints all over the place. So when a person is going about day-to-day life and interacting with the police or applying for a driver’s license or for social service benefits — that effectively becomes an immigration screening opportunity.”

In Washington state, Governor Inslee has launched his review of state data by primarily focusing on two agencies: the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (known as the Department of Licensing) and the state’s Department of Social and Health Services. Nick Brown, general counsel for Governor Inslee, tells The Verge that, in the office’s initial assessment, these two agencies appeared the most likely to contain the potentially relevant data. The state would not block information sharing between any federal law enforcement agency, Brown said, in the case of a genuine threat to public safety. Brown says the review could likely expand to the Washington State Health Care Authority and possibly other agencies that provide public assistance and might collect personal information and indicators of citizenship status.

“It essentially creates border checkpoints all over the place.”

“It’s certainly a question that we’re digging into,” said Brown. “My guess is that it will likely be limited to agencies that provide public benefits.”

Brown says that, because the Washington State Patrol generally uses a federal database for arrest information, the state appears to have little control over what information its police force shares with federal authorities. Kalhan says this is likely the case across the country: most criminal justice data key to the deportation of immigrants who have been been incarcerated is provided to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, a national clearinghouse for arrest data.

Yet states like California and Connecticut, according to public records, do maintain law enforcement databases that state officials have allowed ICE to access directly.

Although the exact extent of direct data-sharing between states and federal immigration authorities remains murky, some glimpses of these programs have emerged in public records, and immigration advocates see any state database that contains information that would be useful to Trump’s deportation plans as a potential point of vulnerability.

State DMVs have worked directly with ICE

State DMVs, for instance, have worked directly with ICE to provide information to the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Office, the country’s primary deportation force, according to the National Immigration Law Center.

In California, federal immigration authorities have utilized a state database of suspected gang networks to arrest and deport suspected gang members. Critics have argued that the database appears flawed and might ensnare innocent people in ICE’s deportation proceedings.

A pending bill in California would put an end to this sort of collaboration between those state and federal agents by outlawing “anyone or any entity” to use a database maintained by a state agency “for the purpose of immigration enforcement.”

“To the millions of undocumented residents pursuing and contributing to the California Dream, the State of California will be your wall of justice should the incoming Administration adopt an inhumane and over-reaching mass-deportation policy,” Senator Kevin de León, the author of the bill, said in a statement. “We will not stand by and let the federal government use our state and local agencies to separate mothers from their children.”

“The State of California will be your wall of justice.”

On Monday, a Democratic state senator in New York proposed a bill that would limit both the state and New York City’s public university systems from compiling data on the number of foreign students enrolled, the programs that such students are enrolled in, as well as the collection of data about students’ nationality and immigration status. A bill introduced in the State Assembly prohibits the state from supplying any data to help the federal government create a registry of people based on race, religion, or nationality.

Similar bills targeting potential registry data have been proposed in California, Washington state, and Massachusetts.

The sponsor of the Massachusetts bill, State Senator Jamie Eldridge, tells The Verge that he has identified the state police and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles as the agencies that house the most data that could be used to build a registry of Muslims. While he might have little ability to stop the Trump administration from building such a registry, Eldridge says, his state can at least refuse to participate.

“State tax dollars and resources should be not going to aid abetting that effort if it’s contrary to our values in Massachusetts,” Eldridge said. “And we believe it is.”

Tech workers are protesting Palantir’s involvement with immigration data

2017-01-13T14:11:55-05:00

Due in part to a Verge report from last month, a group of tech workers in Silicon Valley has announced that it will hold a demonstration outside the headquarters of Palantir Technologies in Palo Alto next Wednesday to protest the company’s involvement in intelligence systems used by federal immigration authorities. Since Donald Trump’s upset victory in November, Palantir has made headlines both for its close relationship with the incoming Republican administration and its involvement in government data platforms that could be used to support Trump’s planned mass deportations and what he calls “extreme vetting” of immigrants seeking to enter the country.

“We want to make it clear that the overall tech community is watching what Palantir does,” says Jason Prado, a software engineer at Facebook and member of the Tech Workers Coalition, the group organizing the Palantir demonstration. “And we want to hold the tech community overall accountable for the values that we as a community have.”

“We want to make it clear that the overall tech community is watching what Palantir does.”

Ahead of next week’s protest, Prado’s group has created an online campaign to collect petition signatures to press Palantir — a company co-founded by billionaire and Trump transition advisor Peter Thiel — to separate itself from any involvement with mass deportations. The group is also demanding Palantir annouce steps it has or will take to ensure its systems are protected from abuse by federal authorities, and for the company to dismantle the system if disclosable safeguards can’t be put in place.

This week, both Thiel and Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, separately pledged that Palantir will not be used to build a Muslim registry — a demand listed by Prado’s group. “We think that’s fantastic,” says Prado, “but we’re also interested in their possible involvement in what we see as mass deportation and we plan to continue pushing on that.”

Last month, I reported for The Verge that Palantir had provided largely-secret assistance to the US Customs and Border Protection agency in administering a complex intelligence platform known as the Analytical Framework for Intelligence, or AFI, which collects and analyzes troves of information on immigrants and other travelers entering, exiting, and moving within the United States.

“This is what extreme vetting means.”

“When Trump uses the term ‘extreme vetting’, AFI is the black-box system of profiling algorithms that he’s talking about,” Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project, a civil liberties initiative that focuses on the rights of travelers, told The Verge in December. “This is what extreme vetting means.”

According to documents obtained through litigation by the Electronic Information Privacy Center, CBP lends out AFI user credentials to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO), the country’s primary deportation force.

Last month, I also reported that Palantir had signed a $34,650,000 in contracts with ICE to help build and maintain a large database and analytics platform called FALCON, which contains employment information, criminal records, immigration history, family connections, as well as home and work addresses. According to Department of Homeland Security oversight documents, FALCON is meant for use by ICE’s Office of Homeland Security Investigations, which pursues serious cross-border crimes such as human trafficking, drug interdiction, and child pornography and is a separate entity from ERO. Tasked with enforcing unverified employment, HSI has conducted some of ICE’s most controversial recent immigration raids on businesses employing undocumented Immigrants — the sort of operations that many immigrant advocates fear will expand under Trump.

“Palantir is a special case.”

Along with its online petition, the Tech Workers Coalition features a pledge for students and alumni of Stanford University — a school where the petition says Thiel’s firm has a major recruiting presence — to “not work for Palantir” and “to continue questioning Palantir’s outsized presence and reputation in our community.”

The group says that this is the first protest it has organized without the help of other organizations. Prado says that he expects “dozens” to turnout Wednesday for the protest and says that his group has alerted the Palo Alto Police Department of the planned action. While its members have participated in recent campaigns to call for tech companies to commit to refuse participation with building a Muslim registry, the Tech Workers Coalition says it is singling out Palantir for the firm’s apparently unique status heading into the Trump era.

“[W]hen a company is already directly contracted with immigration authorities to maintain analytics systems and is already profiting from this relationship, the standards for accountability and transparency need to be higher,” says the site. “Palantir is a special case in this regard.”

Documents suggest Palantir could help power Trump’s ‘extreme vetting’ of immigrants

2016-12-21T12:24:42-05:00

Palantir, the data-mining firm co-founded by tech billionaire and Trump transition adviser Peter Thiel, has provided largely secret assistance to the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) in operating a system that tracks and assesses immigrants and other travelers, according to public records. Known as the Analytical Framework for Intelligence, the system draws from a variety of federal, state, and local law enforcement databases that gather and analyze often-sensitive details about people, including biographical information, personal associations, travel itineraries, immigration records, and home and work addresses, as well as fingerprints, scars, tattoos, and other physical traits.

Records show that Palantir has played an apparently important, although largely undisclosed, role in US Customs and Border Protection intelligence
Training documents suggest Palantir has helped power a government program called the Analytical Framework for Intelligence, which privacy experts say could underlie Trump’s proposed “extreme vetting” of immigrants
In a two-and-a-half-day AFI training session, classes simply labeled “Palantir” occupy far more time than any other single subject
Among the information accessible within the AFI system is data collected by NSEERS, a Bush-era program that required foreign nationals from selected countries — all predominantly Muslim ones with the exception of North Korea — to register

CBP lends out access credentials for the Analytical Framework for Intelligence (AFI) to other law enforcement agencies, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, the country’s primary deportation force. Though little is understood by the public, the Palantir-linked system could represent a powerful and far-reaching tool in Trump’s quest to limit migration into the country.

“When Trump uses the term ‘extreme vetting’, AFI is the black-box system of profiling algorithms that he’s talking about,” says Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project, a civil liberties initiative that focuses on the rights of travelers. “This is what extreme vetting means.”

Dozens of heavily redacted references to Palantir appear in AFI documents that the Electronic Privacy Information Center obtained through a lawsuit.

AFI was implemented in August 2012 as an analytical superstructure and search engine to overlay some of the government’s largest databases of personal and travel information. According to a recent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) oversight report, federal agents can use AFI for a broad range of purposes, such as enforcing immigration laws and assisting field agents “in preventing the illegal entry of people and goods” into the country.

In a 2012 report, DHS highlights AFI’s ability allow agents to search information across varied databases, but Hasbrouck emphasizes that AFI’s most notable function might lay in what he says are top-secret algorithms that process personal data to assess travelers and would-be immigrants. This helps federal authorities determine a person’s eligibility to travel into — or even within — the United States, Hasbrouck says.

“When Trump uses the term ‘extreme vetting’, AFI is the black-box system of profiling algorithms that he’s talking about.”

In its 2012 oversight report DHS touts AFI’s various abilities to process data, which include “geospatial analysis” to help agents learn “about the location or type of location that is favorable for a particular activity,” link analysis to “produce a social network representation of the data,” and temporal analysis “that can be used to predict future activities.”

Since AFI’s inception in 2012, the system appears to have expanded significantly. This past September, DHS issued a notice stating that AFI was no longer merely a scaffold allowing agents to search and analyze various separate databases. In order to increase its efficiency, AFI has become its very own database: the system has begun copying the volumes of information it accesses into its own servers, a development that DHS acknowledged “presents privacy challenges as its functionality relies on continuous replication of data.”

Hasbrouck isn’t alone in his quest to learn more about AFI’s risk calculations, which he says can come into play, for example, anytime a traveler seeks to board a commercial airliner in the United States. The alleged existence of these algorithms were of primary interest to attorneys for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a different privacy group, in filing a lawsuit last year against CBP for records detailing AFI. As a result of the still-ongoing suit, the border control agency has released several hundred pages of material on the system, but the records are so heavily redacted they provide little insight.

AFI has become its very own database

John Tran, an attorney with EPIC, says that one of the most troubling aspects of AFI — and a motivation for his lawsuit — is how little the public knows about the program. “AFI generates risk assessments for travellers,” Tran said. “But we don’t know how the scores are being generated and what the factors are. What if there’s an error? Users should have an opportunity to correct the error, users should have an opportunity to understand what goes into generating the score.”

Yet the heavily blotted documents Tran obtained contain at least one notable feature: they make dozens of references to Palantir.

The records show that Palantir has played an apparently important, although largely undisclosed, role in CBP’s operation of AFI. It is evident from the redactions that the government has deemed most of Palantir’s AFI-related functions too secret to reveal publicly. Even so, the records do provide some insight into the scope, if not the details, of Palantir’s involvement with the intelligence system.

“I don’t think there’s any way to read it other than that Palantir is certainly involved with AFI,” said Tran. The documents, Tran said, suggest that Palantir has played an “active role in management and upkeep of the system.”

Classes labeled “Palantir” occupy far more time than any other single subject

One slide shows that, in a two-and-a-half-day AFI training session, classes simply labeled “Palantir” occupy far more time than any other single subject — spanning an entire day of the otherwise fragmented course. Another slide is fully blacked out under the title that reads “AFI: Palantir Quick Reference Card.” In a federal filing, attorneys for CBP said that disclosure of information regarding this Palantir function would endanger the program’s security and disrupt law enforcement investigations. “Palantir Quick Reference Card provides an overview of key elements, techniques which can be used by law enforcement officers and related keyboard shortcuts designed to assist in navigation of the Palantir application within AFI,” the filing reads. “Disclosure of this information could enable unauthorized users to gain access to the system and alter, add, or delete information altogether, thus destroying the integrity of the system.”

Records accessible via the federal government’s online contract database show that Palantir licenses were provided through the third-party firms Govplace, Akira Technologies, and All Points Logistics to CBP in three separate agreements between 2010 and 2013 that come out to nearly $1.5 million. Though the CBP contracts EPIC obtained do not contain visible references to Palantir, they do show agreements with Akira and All Points, among other firms, in which descriptions of the services provided are heavily redacted.

Throughout the documents, Palantir is often described as being a separate entity from AFI but also an important component of its operation. “The CBP AFI and Palantir data are accessible to AFI users,” reads one otherwise largely redacted passage. “AFI and Palantir are authorized to store/process sensitive but unclassified data and information.”

After it was reported last month that Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder, had joined Donald Trump’s transition team, some observers expressed concern over potential conflicts of interest. Thiel’s company has contracts with the Department of Justice, the Defense Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency, among other agencies. Fears over Thiel’s potentially overlapping interests were heightened when, in response to media queries, Thiel declined to confirm that he had signed the Trump transition team’s standard agreement requiring its members to step away from areas of the transition from which they could personally benefit.

AFI is not the only link Thiel has to agencies that enforce immigration laws dear to Trump. Palantir also has a $34,650,000 contract with ICE to build and maintain an intelligence system called FALCON, which, like AFI, stores and analyzes information it receives from databases kept by various government agencies. FALCON is used by agents within ICE’s Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an office that focuses mostly on serious cross-border criminal activity. The office has conducted some of the agency’s most controversial immigration raids. In September, in Buffalo, New York, HSI agents raided several Mexican restaurants, resulting in the arrest of not only managers but also undocumented workers, some of whom were charged with criminal counts of “illegal re-entry,” causing an outcry from immigrant advocates.

Like the FALCON system, AFI can be applied to diverse areas of law enforcement, and it’s unclear what exact restrictions exist on the tool’s applications. CPB permits the tool to be used by a range of other enforcement agencies, including the US Coast Guard; US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which operates Obama’s now-endangered Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to DHS, access to AFI has been given to ICE’s main deportation force, the Enforcement and Removal Operations, for the purpose of administering “immigration laws and other laws enforced by ICE.”

NSEERS data is accessible within the Palantir-linked AFI system

The 2012 report on AFI lists a number of mechanisms in place that seek to ensure that sensitive personal data is secure within the system and protected from abuse. These include auditing functions that record the search history of its users, authentication of user permissions, and internal controls to ensure that AFI access is only granted on a need-to-know basis. (The training documents EPIC obtained ask instructors to remind their students to refrain from using AFI to search for information about their neighbors, famous people, or themselves.)

CBP was unable to respond to an emailed list of questions and Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.

The 2016 report on AFI mentions one particularly controversial data source. Among the troves of information accessible within the Palantir-linked AFI system is a database containing information gleaned from the Bush-era program called National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, which required foreign nationals from selected countries — all predominantly Muslim ones with the exception of North Korea — to register with the federal government. In recent weeks, the post-9/11 registration system, which critics called a de facto Muslim registry and which Obama suspended in 2011, has been back in headlines as the Trump transition team is reportedly considering plans to either reinstate the program or build something similar.

Regardless of Trump’s plans for NSEERS, federal agents are still apparently able to draw upon data collected years ago by the now-defunct program.

“They phased out the program, but that doesn’t mean they’re purging the data,” said Hasbrouck. “And that’s part of the problem: This stuff lives on forever.”

Through a lawsuit, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) obtained heavily redacted documents related to training agents on how to use Analytical Framework for Intelligence.

Copies of contracts EPIC obtained from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection are extensively redacted.

Welcome to Uberville

2016-09-01T10:16:08-04:00

My first morning in Altamonte Springs, Florida, I was faced with a dilemma: how to travel the two miles from my hotel to city hall without a car. Walking would take nearly an hour in the sweltering June heat. Taking a bus would entail waiting up to half hour at a stop with little shelter from the forecasted thunderstorms, followed by a looping detour to the local mall. The trip could potentially take longer than walking.

Welcome to Uberville

Uber wants to take over public transit, one small town at a time

By Spencer Woodman | Illustration by Jude Buffum

My first morning in Altamonte Springs, Florida, I was faced with a dilemma: how to travel the two miles from my hotel to city hall without a car. Walking would take nearly an hour in the sweltering June heat. Taking a bus would entail waiting up to a half hour at a stop with little shelter from the forecasted thunderstorms, followed by a looping detour to the local mall. The trip could potentially take longer than walking.

I was on my way to meet Frank Martz, Altamonte’s city manager. For nearly two decades, Martz had fought to overhaul Altamonte’s transit system with a fleet of demand-responsive public busses. He called the plan FlexBus, and it would use custom-designed software to optimize routes for vehicles that riders would order from kiosks or even desktop computers. Martz saw FlexBus as the key to transforming Altamonte, a loose agglomeration of palm tree-lined strip malls and culs-de-sac a few miles north of Orlando, into a thriving and walkable destination.

Despite Martz’s persistent lobbying, bureaucratic delays and disagreements with the regional transit authority stalled the project for years, Martz says. Finally last October, the Federal Transit Administration withdrew millions in vital funding. FlexBus was dead.

But the transit landscape had changed since Martz began his quest. In the years before FlexBus was founded, some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies had begun offering on-demand transportation reminiscent of Martz’s vision. So just weeks after burying FlexBus, Martz called Uber. His inquiry was blunt: did the company want to make Altamonte the world’s first public transportation system based on ride-share technology?

Martz’s proposal would make the suburb of Altamonte an unlikely test bed for one future of public transit. It would also raise questions about whether such a future can serve everyone equally, and force Martz to navigate between the transparency of public office and the demands of a multibillion dollar company with a penchant for secrecy.

By the time Martz called Uber, less radical versions of his proposal had begun proliferating across the county. As Bloomberg noted last month, both Uber and Lyft have been striking agreements with transit agencies, mostly for so-called “first-last mile” programs — meant to shuttle commuters to bus or train stations. Since last year, Uber has scored public transit agreements with San Francisco, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, among other cities. Uber and Lyft have also been edging into niche public transportation services, like transit for disabled people or low-income residents who need rides to work or the grocery store. Last month officials in Washington, DC proposed having Uber respond to some 911 calls for ambulances.

Even Google’s Alphabet, through its Sidewalk Labs program, has joined the transit bonanza. The company recently offered to overhaul transit in Columbus, Ohio with a system that sets parking prices based on demand and funnels low-income commuters into subsidized ride-share vehicles.

These companies are arriving at an opportune time for cities, many of which are struggling just to fund existing transit service, much less expand it to meet the needs of growing numbers of urban commuters. Both Uber and Lyft tell The Verge that the past year has seen a surge in public officials interested in giving the companies taxpayer dollars for public transit contracts. For the companies, it’s an appealing new way to establish themselves as vital infrastructure, especially in low-density communities like Altamonte where running traditional mass transit can be expensive. Given the pace at which these partnerships are coming together, it’s possible to imagine ride-hail companies taking on the role of all-encompassing, smartphone-driven public transit providers, one town at a time.

But for some transit advocates, the embrace of Uber and its competitors risks undermining civic ideals of accessibility and transparency. In Altamonte, there are already signs that these concerns could be warranted. The pilot program is unusable for people without a smartphone or credit card, and the company attempted to have the city sign an unusually far-reaching nondisclosure agreement.

Ultimately, critics worry that if these programs succeed, they could pluck the affluent commuters who wield real political influence off trains and busses, leading to a crisis of declining ridership and decreasing clout for traditional public transportation.

Uber has so far been pitching itself as a supplement to existing transit programs rather than a replacement. But in June of last year, for the company’s five-year anniversary, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick envisioned a future where increasing efficiency would make Uber cost-competitive not just with owning a car, but with traditional mass transit. When drivers drop off a customer only to pick up another, chained together in a “perpetual trip,” Kalanick said, “not only is it much less expensive than taking a cab or owning a car, it has the potential to be as affordable as taking a subway, or a bus, or other means of transportation. And that’s what we believe is the real game-changer. Those are the things we’ll be working on in years to come.”

With the help of public subsidies, that future is coming fast. The speed with which Uber has entered the public transit sector has stunned industry activists. “It’s happening very quickly,” says Lawrence Hanley, the international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union. “It’s like a tsunami.”

I didn’t have an hour to spare getting across town to meet Martz, so government Uber was the obvious choice. Opening the app, I noticed a new option had appeared next to UberX: an “Altamonte” car. Upon being scooped up by an off-duty drug counselor in a sleek Chrysler, it became clear that the app had so seamlessly incorporated the municipal transit program as to, aside from the car name, wholly hide its civic underpinning. It was Uber as usual in every way, but cheaper. Indeed, most of the Uber drivers who shuttled me around town that week told me they had no idea their rides were being subsidized by the government.

It wasn’t until I arrived at city hall that I fully understood the aggressively suburban layout of Altamonte. I had imagined Martz’s office as being inside a stately administrative building somewhere central, but though it’s technically a municipality, Altamonte has nothing resembling a center. Its low-slung city hall sits anonymously amid a cluster of one-story gray-brick buildings off the six-lane State Road 436, largely hidden by the Altamonte Executive Center strip mall.

Martz led me into his conference room and took a seat in front of a floor-to-ceiling city map, which, because of Altamonte’s curlicue suburban street scheme, could double as patterned wallpaper. He wasted little time in noting, with a prideful note of irony, that the building that once housed the regional commuter rail headquarters was where he had conceived the first fully smartphone-driven public transit network.

A former minor league baseball player, Martz has a sturdy frame and speaks with prim efficiency, but he slips into exuberance when discussing his long-delayed success in bringing demand-responsive public transit to Altamonte.

“We recognized this much earlier than most, that the issue of transit usage was not about infrastructure,” Martz said. “It’s about convenience and control.”

When Martz dialed Uber in November, the company jumped at his inquiry. Within two weeks of the call, an Uber manager flew from Washington, DC to Orlando to meet with him, he says. After two months of discussions, Uber sent Martz a chart laying out the possible future of their partnership. At a subsidy rate of 25 percent — and assuming the ridership would grow annually by 100 percent — Uber would receive roughly a million dollars per year from the city. A potential indication of Uber’s aspirations, the chart also included a scenario in which Altamonte would pay Uber a full 100 percent subsidy, putting the town on the hook for up to nearly $7 million in ride-share funding over a two-year span.

(Uber also sent Martz a document instructing that its logo “should be treated with respect” and laying out in anxious detail what that entails. In promoting the program, Martz was forbidden from placing the Uber logo “anywhere that could degrade our brand,” including on doormats or anywhere else where it could be trodden on; on things like napkins or paper plates that would be quickly thrown away; on dartboards or urinals; on food, which, the document explains, will be sliced, broken, eaten, and is associated with the feces it will later become; or on underwear, condoms, “or anything else that would link Uber and sexual situations.”)

Martz settled on a 20 percent subsidy for any trip within Altamonte, and 25 percent for rides to and from the city’s commuter rail station. Martz foresees the yearlong pilot costing taxpayers less than a hundred thousand dollars, far cheaper than building a new bus system. Nor does it involve navigating the regional transit authority or negotiating with potentially unionized public employees.

In the final days of February, the city cemented the details of its new public transit system, and on March 4th, it announced the pilot.

The response shocked even Martz: in the weeks following the launch, Uber ridership within Altamonte exploded, rising tenfold, Martz told me. Calls cascaded in from officials in other cities curious about Martz’s experiment

Just weeks after the March launch, the neighboring, more affluent suburb of Maitland began considering an identical pilot program. By July, it and three other cities in the northern Orlando area had approved copycat Uber deals, bringing more than a hundred thousand of the region’s residents into the sphere of Uber-run public transit. Interest in Martz’s deal was not limited to central Florida, either. Martz said transit officials from Los Angeles, Boulder, and Boston have called him for information on the partnership.

During my time in Altamonte, the government-backed Ubers worked just as intended. The two-mile ride to city hall came out to around $4 — two dollars more than the local bus system, but taking a fraction of the time.

On a sweltering Wednesday afternoon, I visited some of Altamonte’s train and bus stations to get a sense of its non-Uber transit options. The Altamonte station of the new greater-Orlando commuter rail system, known as SunRail, lies on a desolately commercial intersection of State Road 436 — populated on its other three sides by a Citgo station, a funeral home, and a bright yellow cash advance service touting itself as “Almost a Bank.”

The station was completely empty when I got there. Eventually, a train arrived and a trickle of people debarked and meandered toward the adjoining bus depot.

One of them was Todd Harrold, a 53-year-old resident of nearby Sanford, which has also approved an Altamonte-style subsidy. He had just stepped off SunRail with his bicycle and was headed to the mall to look for a new pair of glasses. He had planned to take the bus, but finding it would be a half hour wait, decided to bike the two miles down the six-lane highway. “It’s 15 minutes to bike — not bad if I don’t get hit,” he said. Harrold has no smartphone and has never been able to use Uber.

More than half a dozen residents I spoke with in Altamonte had been shut out of the city’s new transit system for various reasons — some lacked credit cards or smartphones, while others were disabled and would have difficulty getting in a regular car. Unlike taxis, Uber isn’t required to provide services for disabled passengers.

At a bus station near the freight area of the Altamonte Mall, I spoke with a homeless man who has no credit card or smartphone, a wheelchair-bound woman waiting for the bus, and a man with a severely cracked Motorola LG onto which he’d downloaded an Uber app that could not get past its undulating loading page. Like Harrold, they were all effectively left behind by the city’s new transit system, and would take the Lynx bus home that day.

Some transit advocates fear that such stories will become more common in a world of Uberized public transport. “Quality public transportation is just that — public — and it’s the fundamental reason transit agencies are required to make an effort to reach out to people with disabilities, people without bank accounts, and people without smartphones,” says Jacob Anbinder, a spokesperson for the TransitCenter, a foundation dedicated to improving urban mobility. “As Uber finds itself entering into contracts that require it to act as a provider of public transportation, the company will have to adapt to serve this same broad market of riders.”

For Altamonte’s pilot project, this has not yet been the case. The city’s contract with Uber includes nothing regarding the access of people with disabilities or those without smartphones.

Nor does the contract mention the local taxi company, which is required by federal law to serve disabled customers. “You’ve got the city deciding that they’re going to subsidize the easiest to serve, able-bodied young people going out for beer and wings,” said Roger Chapin, the vice president of public affairs at Mears Transportation, Orlando’s decades-old cab company, who says he learned about Altamonte’s Uber deal through the local newspaper.

Uber acknowledges its services aren’t as accessible as they could be, but says it is fast evolving. Andrew Salzberg, head of Transportation Policy and Research at Uber, pointed to experiments the company has launched to deploy fleets of wheelchair-accessible Ubers, and noted that in Pinellas County, Florida, Uber is testing a call-in dispatch service for low-income residents who will be able to access the system with or without smartphones. “We’re not at the final answer to these problems,” Salzberg told me, “but we’re getting to the right places through a bunch of initiatives.”

Martz acknowledged that some people would be denied access to Altamonte’s Uber system, but said that a “one-size-fits-all” mode of transit would be too inefficient, and that people without smartphones have alternatives, like the public bus system. He also pointed to a Lynx-run transit service that disabled Altamonte residents can call upon.

In discussing the accessibility gaps in his transit system, Martz described it as a matter of consumer choice. “A hunter using a bow and arrow will not feed his family as efficiently as a hunter with a gun,” Martz told me. “And there are still plenty of transportation choices, although not as good, for those people who don’t have smartphone access. Users have to make the choice, and I think that’s the beauty of our pilot. Instead of jamming tech or infrastructure down the throats of potential users, we’ve provided just one more of them. Users will make the choice that’s best for them. If they prefer to not have a smartphone that’s the life they choose to live.”

On January 27th, a partnership specialist at Uber sent Martz’s colleague a nondisclosure agreement and asked for an e-signature. The NDA was broad in scope, requiring Altamonte keep secret “any technical or business information” regarding Uber, or else face a potential lawsuit that could put the city on the hook for attorney fees and civil damages. It would also mean that a taxpayer-funded program could potentially violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the state’s transparency laws.

Martz responded immediately, asking a different Uber official whether the company would reconsider. “[R]emember we are a government in the sunshine,” Martz told an Uber general manager for Florida. “So some of the codicils here are not lawful.”

Martz quickly prevailed in getting Uber to drop the NDA, but a few weeks later, something odd popped up in a draft of the public transit agreement Altamonte would sign with Uber. In a proviso toward the bottom of the agreement, Uber granted itself a privilege to field public records requests that the city receives regarding its partnership. “In the event City receives a Public Record Law request for documents that Uber considers trade secret or otherwise confidential,” the final contract reads, the city “agrees to promptly notify Uber of said request and shall not make an immediate disclosure.”

Uber’s penchant for secrecy can put it at odds with conventions of government transparency. In other cities, the company has convinced regulators to allow it to hide its ridership data — Uber’s agreement with Boston requires the city to keep Uber’s ridership data under wraps, even stipulating that the company will pay the city’s litigation costs in a fight to keep that data confidential. In San Francisco, data that Lyft or Uber gives the city is under seal and thus reportedly hidden — even from city transportation planners.

For public transit partnerships that allot tax dollars to private companies, a wide degree of openness about ridership data is standard, says Anbinder of TransitCenter. “We like to say you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Ridership data can also shed light on whether a transit system is benefiting an entire community or just a part of it. “Where and when are trips ending?” asks Mariah Montgomery, a campaign strategist at the Partnership for Working Families, which has pressed Uber for ridership data. “That data… allows you to see where there is a need, and also gives you a sense of whether they are serving all neighborhoods equitably.”

An Uber spokesperson told The Verge that asking public agencies to sign NDAs is not a standard company practice. And Uber’s Salzberg acknowledged that his company has been less forthcoming with ridership data than some of its older competitors, but said that times have changed — and competition has intensified. “Yellow cabs have been great about this in the past,” Salzberg said, adding that such companies often held monopolies over their markets, making the release of data of little competitive concern. “There’s a different competitive situation for data that makes it different for us to be as transparent as things were before.”

When I asked Martz for Altamonte’s ridership data, he politely declined, citing Uber’s preference for confidentiality as well as a Florida state court ruling on Uber’s ridership data. “Sometimes the thing that matters most is moving people, not being able to find every piece of paper,” he said. Martz says that he, a few members of his senior staff, and city commissioners are allowed to review the Altamonte ridership data, but not the general public.

Uber’s desire for confidentiality in its dealings with public agencies extends beyond ridership data. Last month, a transit official in Pinellas County named Chris Cochran told me about an initiative in which Uber would experiment with a call-in dispatch system for riders who lack smartphones. Cochran’s openness came off as routine: he was a public official simply talking about a partnership his agency was negotiating.

But shortly after I asked Uber about the program, I received an email from Cochran. Uber had contacted him, urging him not to release the name of the initiative even though it was technically a matter of the public record. Cochran feared that the very act of releasing the Uber product name — UberCentral — before the official launch could have killed the entire partnership. “We just don’t want to jeopardize our partnership by not at least trying to prevent that from going out,” Cochran said, later adding that, “they just want to keep it under wraps.”

(Like Martz, Cochran came to Uber after facing a setback in a major push to widen Pinellas County’s existing mass transit options. In 2014, his agency failed to pass a 1 cent sales tax that would have expanded bus service and created a light rail system, and instead was forced to cut back the existing bus system.)

I also asked for ridership data from the local transit authority in Pinellas County regarding its deal with Uber to subsidize trips to local bus stations. Citing a state statute governing trade secret exemptions to government records, a spokesperson denied the request.

After several days in Altamonte, I went to Pinellas County to see how one of Uber’s first partnerships with a public transit agency was faring. Like many of the company’s early efforts, Uber had attempted to bridge gaps in the existing transit infrastructure, offering discounted rides to and from bus stations.

Parking on a street in a tucked-away, working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, I summoned an Uber to take me to a bus station just under a mile away. A few minutes later, a driver appeared in an immaculate Kia Soul and whisked me to the Walmart bus stop. Largely subsidized by the county, the trip cost only $2.77.

My experience was smooth, but in June Cochran of the PSTA told me that the program’s ridership had been modest. “It has not been a huge success in terms of ridership numbers,” said Cochran. “I can be upfront about that.”

In the case of Altamonte, the city’s first-last mile initiative, which offers a discount of 25 percent when traveling to train stations, has lagged far behind the city’s main Uber program. “The monstrous majority” of subsidized Uber rides in Altamonte, Martz says “are intra community trips.”

The experiences of Pinellas County and Altamonte Springs comport with the observations of Jon Orcutt, director of communications and advocacy at the Transit Center. “The whole idea of First Mile Last Mile is really overblown,” says Orcutt. “It misses the point that most people that use transit most often live and work near it.”

Uber tells a different story, saying that its rides to and from transit stations bridge a key gap. Salzberg, Uber’s transportation policy official, says this role fits perfectly with the company’s mission of getting more people into fewer cars, and with transit agencies’ need to maintain ridership. And Salzberg says, Uber may not need public transit dollars to influence the sector. Even in cities without partnerships with public transit agencies, customers have begun relying on Uber to shuttle them to and from commuter rail stations, Salzberg says. “And that’s happening without us promoting it — it just made sense.”

Yet this month the Bay Area suburb of Dublin will launch an Altamonte-style program with Uber and Lyft, offering subsidized fares capped at $5 rides throughout the project area, rather than a first-last mile incentive. In fact, thanks to the program, the local transit agency reportedly cut a low-ridership bus route.

Subsidies or not, if Uber can drive its price low enough, at a certain point it could start to look more like a replacement for mass transit than a supplement to it. Recently the company has struck out on its own, experimenting with big-picture alternatives to public transit even in cities that have yet to fund its services. In February Uber reportedly offered its fixed-route “UberHOP” rides for just $1 in Seattle, a significant savings over buses. In May, as Washington, DC was preparing for more subway shutdowns due to maintenance, Uber announced it would expand its UberPool program throughout the agency’s service area, pitching itself as a congestion-reducing alternative to the city’s faltering transit system. Uber’s popularity in the city apparently got the attention of a DC transit official, who said that “the need for late-night service is lower since people are using [ride-hailing] services.”

In New York, where Uber has skirmished with Mayor Bill de Blasio and where the Metropolitan Transit Authority has blamed it and Lyft for $10 million in lost revenue, Uber rolled out a summertime monthly pass granting commuters unlimited Uber rides during morning and evening rush hours. At $79 per month, the price significantly undercuts the MTA’s prices for someone riding the subway twice daily, though its hours and coverage area are more limited. That cost may be further driven down through a partnership with WageWorks that was announced this week, which will let New York riders pay for UberPool using pretax dollars.

Of course, all these cost cuts will pale in comparison to what Uber will be able to do once it replaces human drivers with autonomous vehicles, which the company recently began testing in Pittsburgh.

With or without the cooperation of public agencies, Uber is becoming a new transit provider for at least a segment of the population. For cities like New York with extensive transit systems, this could mean a new front in the Uber wars — or a new era of private-public collaboration in transit. Either way, the rise of ride-sharing will spell major changes in how the country’s largest transit systems move people.

Yet, as officials from both Uber and Lyft emphasized in speaking with me, America’s largest cities could be mere sideshows compared to smaller towns and suburbs. And some experts say that the highest-density subway and bus lines could not be replaced by Uber anyway, arguing that it would cause too much roadway congestion. But the vast majority of Americans live in places more like car-dominated Altamonte than hyperdense Manhattan. “That is an emerging area where you can expect to see more activity,” said Emily Castor, director of transportation policy at Lyft. Castor says Lyft is “very interested” in propagating the Altamonte model across the country and sees it as “an opportunity to grow Lyft in suburban areas rather than just the urban core.” Uber’s Saltzberg noted that only 2 or 3 percent of total trips in the US are done via public transit and asserts that Uber wants to be “a tool in the toolkit for cities that are trying to make better transportation choices.”

Despite lingering concerns over transparency and accessibility, the earliest results of Uber’s Altamonte experiment show a considerable demand for Uber in government. As soon as next year, Martz said, the five neighboring cities that have signed copycat deals could create a seamless network of Uber subsidies that will allow riders to traverse the region on the tax-funded Ubers. And Edward L. Johnson, the head of the greater Orlando regional transit system, Lynx — which services more than 1.8 million residents in an area roughly the size of Delaware — says his agency is hoping to soon begin incorporating ride-share companies into its offerings, possibly with an across-the-board subsidy similar to Altamonte’s.

With FlexBus, Martz says he had failed to make the regional transit authority budge. Now, thanks to Uber, projects are racing ahead, and Martz doesn’t seem surprised.

“Uber had brought to the market a very workable solution,” Martz told me. “The choice was obvious to us.”

Produced by Frank Bi

Design by James Bareham

Edited by Josh Dzieza

Uber is experimenting with a phone dispatch system

2016-06-14T13:11:29-04:00

Uber is experimenting with a decidedly retro service: a telephone dispatch system that would allow people without smartphones to call a hotline and order an Uber ride, according to a transit official in Pinellas County, Florida. The system is being tested as a pilot program in conjunction with the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, which plans to launch it on July 18th. The call-in feature is part of a local program that will grant publicly subsidized Uber rides to low-income residents who do not have cars or easy access to the area’s bus-based public transit system, according to Christopher Cochran, senior planner at the PSTA.

The call-in feature signals that Uber is looking not only to expand its clientele beyond its smartphone wielding, tech-savvy customer base, but also that the ride-hailing giant hopes to be taken more seriously by public transit agencies as a complement — or even alternative — to existing mass transport options.

The ride-hailing giant hopes to be taken more seriously by public transit agencies

“What this reflects is that as Uber moves more into the public realm and begins offering its services to a broader audiences, it will have to evolve in a way that will move it away from its roots as a tech company,” said Jacob Anbinder, a spokesperson for the TransitCenter, a foundation dedicated to expanding urban mobility. “The more that you involve yourself in public policy as a company, the more you’re going to have to expand your offerings to reach people who don’t have smartphones or don’t have the Uber app.”

In February, Pinellas County became the first transit agency in the country to subsidize Uber rides (as well as those from a local taxi service) to and from designated bus stations, in an attempt to make its transit system more accessible, according to Christopher Cochran, a senior planner at the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority.

Under the new plan, “transit disadvantaged” residents, including those without the Uber app, will be granted a taxpayer-subsidized Uber ride each month to anywhere within the service area during daytime hours in the case that they are facing an urgent situation requiring transit, according to Cochran. The dispatcher will have the discretion to determine whether a situation qualifies as urgent and “life sustaining,” and the program will cover things as minor as grocery shopping and as major as a medical emergency, Cochran says.

“What we’re doing now is a proof of concept.”

“This is going to dramatically change the efficiency with which transit-disadvantaged people can access the system,” Cochran says. “There is no question that this is going to be much bigger than what there is now — what we’re doing now is a proof of concept.”

With the pilot project, Cochran says the dispatch center will be run and funded by the PSTA, which last week received a $300,000 state grant that will subsidize Uber rides. Uber will provide call-in software that will enable dispatchers to send Uber drivers to call-in customers, says Cochran. The county plans to pay Uber directly for the ride subsidies, which will cover everything beyond the three-dollar flat fee that qualifying riders will pay.

Uber declined to provide any specifics in response to to a request for comment. “We are always exploring ways to make the Uber experience better for riders and drivers,” an Uber spokesperson said in an email. “At any given time, cities pilot various features in an effort to improve how people get from A to B.”

The dispatch center will be run and funded by the county

Cochran says that his agency turned to Uber after failing to pass a local one-cent sales tax that would have expanded traditional mass transit options by increasing bus service and creating a light rail system. The defeat of the penny tax also required the agency, facing a budget shortfall, to cut back existing bus service. Turning to Uber represented an opportunity to fill such gaps but also held the potential to reach new potential riders while also providing access to those without the Uber app, according to Cochran, who says that a similar Uber program has been previously utilized by businesses.

For Anbinder, adoption of dispatch software could represent a consequential shift in Uber’s business model as its competition with the traditional taxi industry matures.

“What you’re seeing essentially is the convergence of two ends of this market where in places like New York and DC you’re seeing taxi companies adopt Uber-alternative apps that allow you to use your smartphone to hail a taxi on demand,” said Anbinder. “And now you’re seeing Uber also move toward the middle by offering services that work like the taxis we’re used to.”

At the Libertarian Convention, where blockchain evangelists dream of a perfect election

2016-05-05T11:27:47-04:00

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Last Saturday, fans of minimal government gathered for the New York Libertarian Party Convention, which was held in the ballroom of a decidedly unflashy Ukrainian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. The attendees, who ranged from shiny-shoed businessmen to scruffy survivalist-looking types, were there to vote for the presidential delegates who will travel to the party’s national gathering in Orlando later this month.

But Nick Spanos had arrived on a slightly different mission. A former Ron Paul campaign consultant, he’s now the CEO of Blockchain Technologies Corp., a new company that seeks to replace America’s voting system with Bitcoin-derived blockchain technology, and which had been selected to run the convention’s vote that day. Though the convention was small, encompassing just several dozen voters, for Spanos it represented a chance to demonstrate his vision for the future of elections administration, one where votes are recorded on a blockchain database subject to full public scrutiny.

Around 1 in the afternoon, word began spreading that anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee — who was recently deported from Guatemala and is now back in the US, vying for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination — had entered the premises. Spanos spared no time in introducing me to the aspiring politician.

Nick Spanos had arrived on a slightly different mission

But McAfee, with fading green highlights in his hair and an intense stare, quickly dismissed the core mission of Spano’s company, proceeding to stump against larger evils. “The problem has nothing to do with technology. It has nothing to do with purity and truth. It has to do with power, and we have a system in America that controls the voting process,” McAfee told me. “We can talk about the technology all day long, but it means nothing unless you have a plan for usurping that control.”

As McAfee spoke, I noticed that Spanos and I were both wearing gold-colored admission wristbands, which convention organizers had given to guests they could not afford to feed during the day’s events at the budget Ukrainian restaurant and ballroom. Given how widely the party’s ideas have influenced powerful Republicans, the convention’s modesty lent the Libertarians an underdog air. And, in this backdrop, McAfee’s call for revolution felt a bit ambitious.

Seeming to prefer a more gradualist approach, Spanos was visibly amused by McAfee’s indictment. He’s also eager to expand beyond the Libertarian community, saying that his products are on the verge of being adopted by customers that would dwarf the spendthrift third-party convention. He claims to be in talks with multiple domestic and foreign governments about running their elections on his software.

"It has nothing to do with purity and truth."

Having grown up entertaining himself with elaborate circuitry projects in Long Island, Spanos has spent the last few decades focusing on the more technical aspects of campaign consulting and election logistics. He says the inspiration for Blockchain Technologies came partly from frustrations with the opacity of Florida’s voting machines during the 2004 presidential election, when he was working for Republicans. “I asked them, ‘Let me see the source code,'” Spanos told me, saying that he was denied at every turn. “When you don’t know what the hell any of the machines do, how are you supposed to have a transparent election? … They could be counting digital unicorns.”

The principles that underlie Blockchain Technologies’ proposed solution are fairly simple. In the system Spanos deployed over the weekend, a voter fills out a paper ballot that’s marked with three QR codes, that assign it a unique blockchain identity. Once scanned, the company’s system routes the digitized vote to the candidate’s “wallet,” and the Blockchain record begins to expand. After voting, public versions of the blockchains are released for open inspection (although, as in traditional elections, voter’s identities are not tied to ballots).

All that the company’s technology requires is a computer, a printer, a screen, and a scanner — which Spanos says should be kept disconnected from the internet ensure security. Blockchain’s technology can be adapted to all varieties of voting, Spanos says, including electronic voting machines. Yet Spanos emphasized that he prefers to have voters mark their choices on paper ballots. This is meant to not only add a layer of accountability to the system by leaving a paper trail, but also to put voters’ minds at ease. “Humans need the paper ballot,” Spanos told me. “It’s going to be a long time before a human trusts a computer.” Instead, Spanos argues that his technology can essentially improve analog paper balloting by locking results into the blockchain, creating an obstacle to manipulating any tabulation after the fact.

"They could be counting digital unicorns."

Spanos leans Libertarian, but says he has worked for both Democrats and Republicans and appears at home in the company of all manner of politician. As his team diligently set up their polling operation on two dining tables in a half-lit corner of the restaurant, Spanos pushed aside silverware at a nearby table and opened his laptop. Using Wi-Fi from an adjacent diner, Spanos showed me several chunks of inscrutable blockchain code before pulling up photographs of his work involving foreign politicians. He had shots of him posing with former Soviet head-of-state Mikhail Gorbachev, photos of him shaking hands with a Somali politician, and — something he was particularly excited to show me — a choppy video of him boldly propping his feet on a coffee table within eyeshot of Fidel Castro at a formal dinner. (Spanos says he also specializes in event planning and logistics of high-profile public figures.)

Spanos argues that the beauty of Blockchain lies in how difficult it makes manipulating the system, even for a biased administrator. “This here, I can’t change any of this shit,” Spanos said, pointing to an unused ballot, the type that his colleagues had just been frantically printing off on 8.5 x 11 office paper. “Even if I wanted to, there’s no way I could change this person’s ballot. This is here forever and the whole world can see it.”

"Even if I wanted to, there’s no way I could change this person’s ballot."

Spanos’ pitch has been enough to convince an initial round of clients. In February, his company worked with Rand Paul’s campaign during the Iowa caucuses, according to a press release, and last month it administered voting at the 2016 Texas Libertarian Convention. Spanos says that he is also in talks with several foreign governments about helping to administer their elections. Citing political sensitivity and competitive concerns, he declined to name any country in particular. He also says that he is speaking to numerous US governmental jurisdictions (which he also declined to name), including a school board in Texas, that he says is looking like a particularly hopeful candidate for his first ever official government election.

As the voting commenced Saturday, Spanos circled the faux-wood ballroom collecting ballots with a wire-mesh basket he paraded above his head. As Spanos delivered the votes to his team’s processing table in the adjoining dining room, a crowd began to form around the operation. After striking up a few conversations with the gawkers, I realized that they were official election observers who had been dispatched by candidates to guard against counting shenanigans.

"What did Stalin say? 'It's not who votes, but who counts the votes?'"

This shouldn’t have been a surprise: like American conservatives at large, those I spoke with at the Libertarian Convention professed deep mistrust of election administration. This is something that Blockchain Technologies could no doubt capitalize on. It’s possible to imagine that, among red-state governments staffed by officials with similar sentiments, Blockchain Technologies could find receptive ears for its sales pitch of protecting against ostensibly ubiquitous election fraud.

The day after the Libertarian vote, Spanos sent me a video of Republicans — including former Arizona governor Jan Brewer — alleging that electronic voting machines seemed to have been rigged at the party’s convention, which had also taken place on Saturday. “It could have happened, they could have done that in Arizona,” Spanos told me, emphasizing that his company’s system can leave a paper trail. “But even if nothing happened, if no one got robbed, people still need to feel confident in the results.”

“What did Stalin say? ‘It’s not who votes, but who counts the votes?'” Spanos mused. “But if you count them openly, it’s back to ‘who votes.'”