ICE Investigations, Powered by Nvidia

Nvidia the computing giant that this week became the world s first trillion company is powering U S Immigration and Customs Enforcement s investigative division according to federal records reviewed by The Intercept This summer ICE renewed access to application tools for use by Homeland Safety Investigations or HSI an enforcement division previously tasked with transnational crime that has become increasingly common on American streets under the Trump administration The transaction according to federal procurement figures provided Nvidia program licenses which will be used by Homeland Guard Investigations to enhance figures analysis improve investigative capabilities through high-performance computing solutions HSI s growing funding in LLMs large language models suggests that it may be investing in systems that can be used to surveil U S citizens refugees and visitors explained Amos Toh senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice Large language models can be used to draw inference by fusing people s publicly available facts and might be used by ICE to to identify persons of interest and generate investigative leads There are well-documented flaws however in the way the AI crunches evidence and reproduces biases Toh declared These problems make it more likely that people will be targeted based on flawed intelligence In a declaration ICE announced Like other law enforcement agencies ICE employs various forms of machinery to investigate criminal activity and sponsorship law enforcement efforts while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests When questioned whether Nvidia had any ability to ensure ICE was using its hardware lawfully company spokesperson John Rizzo reported The Intercept Millions of U S consumers businesses and establishment agencies use general-purpose computers every day We do not and cannot monitor the use of general-purpose computers by U S regime employees Related Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom Despite the Best Efforts of ICE s Intelligence Unit HSI s mission has shifted during President Donald Trump s second administration The ICE division has long since assisted in civil immigration enforcement but its focus was on criminal investigations such as drug smuggling and human trafficking HSI has long sought to distance itself from ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations which carries out basic immigration law enforcement revealed Aaron Reichlin-Melnick a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council advised The Intercept On January President Trump signed an executive order directing HSI to make immigration enforcement its top priority Nvdia has been cozying up to Trump who is threatening restrictions on chip exports to China a lucrative realm for the chipmaker At a speech at a Nvidia tech conference in Washington on Tuesday CEO Jensen Huang praised Trump and thanked those assembled for your system and helping make America great again How Nvidia Might Help ICE How ICE plans to use Nvidia s services is unclear the specific program in question is not disclosed in the procurement documents Nvidia offers a variety of software-based services that could be useful for ICE information analysis Nvidia has a dominant position across machine learning and artificial intelligence fields including platforms to run large language models and video analytics The reseller through which ICE is buying access to Nvidia products California-based New Tech Solutions has previously sold the U S ruling body licenses for virtual workstations which essentially lease remote access to powerful chips known as graphics processing units or GPUs housed in information centers owned by Nvidia Such hardware could be used to train and query machine learning models A statement by the Department of Homeland Safety on its possible usage of machine learning flagged HSI as standing to benefit from adopting the hardware including by rapidly searching and summarizing suspicious activity reports through large language models HSI agents could promptly access and make sense of more than tens of millions of reports through ad hoc unstructured queries over a voice interface the overview says adding that the system could also automatically scan and classify the contents of footage recorded by HSI agents A in recent times published inventory of strategies DHS is using artificial intelligence tools reveals other areas where ICE may be able to make use of Nvidia s high-performance computing solutions The document which reflects Homeland Safety practices as of July notes HSI uses machine learning algorithms to identify and extract critical evidence relationships and networks from mobile device information leveraging machine learning capabilities to determine locations of interest The document also says HSI uses large language models to identify the largest part relevant information in reports accelerating investigative analysis by rapidly identifying persons of interest surfacing trends and detecting networks or fraud HSI s Shifting Mission Procurement records about HIS s use of Nvidia mechanism comes as ICE ramps up its presence in cities and towns across the U S Raids by ICE are viewed as being increasingly extreme and unchecked by legal or guidelines constraints leading to aggressive protests against the immigrant enforcement HSI is playing a growing role in the controversial enforcement and the crackdown on demonstrations Since Trump s executive order on HSI noted Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council large numbers of agents have been reassigned away from criminal investigations to carry out immigration arrests instead Related Google Secretly Handed ICE Evidence About Pro-Palestine Scholar Activist HSI agents in Washington have rounded up residents for minor traffic infractions and earlier this month fired a gun into a man s car In June HSI took part in the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside an ICE facility he was scheduled to tour with a delegation of New Jersey lawmakers Charges of trespassing against Baraka were later dismissed HSI s pursuits though go beyond street arrests and workplace raids This week Media disclosed the agency was collecting utility customer input from Con Edison Like majority of large tech firms Nvidia s declares it adheres to various international human rights frameworks including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which prohibits prejudice based on race or national origin The post ICE Investigations Powered by Nvidia appeared first on The Intercept