Hate Meta glasses? Wait until you hear about ICE glasses

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

I’m Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), and welcome to The Classifieds. Read on to learn about this week’s top secrecy news.

ICE smart glasses = incessant warrantless domestic surveillance

Last August, 404 Media reported that at a June immigration raid outside a Home Depot in Los Angeles, a Customs and Border Protection agent was seen wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban AI smart glasses, which can record video and use artificial intelligence to pull up real-time data.

Concerned about the privacy implications, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a wide range of records about CBP agents’ use of smart glasses, including Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses, during immigration raids.

Despite the photographic evidence, CBP told me that it had no records responsive to my request.

A recent scoop by Ken Klippenstein shows the agency was almost certainly lying, or playing a delusional game of semantics to avoid honestly responding to the request.

Klippenstein reports that a budget document shows the Department of Homeland Security is currently developing its own smart glasses for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies. These so-called ICE glasses will enable agents to surveil all Americans wherever they encounter them, and capture their biometric data without their consent or a warrant (and possibly store this data in a growing, centralized database that could be easily abused).

Needless to say, FPF has filed additional FOIA requests about these surveillance tools, and we will report what we learn.

Why did ODNI scrub its FOIA website after record release to FPF?

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence completely removed its FOIA website after an FPF records request made headlines for completely undermining the Trump administration’s faulty legal rationale for deporting Venezuelan nationals to a Salvadoran prison. When the website came back online, it was practically wiped.

Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold wanted to know what happened, and filed a FOIA to find out.

The agency released 18 pages of emails that appear to confirm what we suspected all along: ODNI’s political leadership intentionally sabotaged its FOIA website to retaliate against the public and its FOIA office for lawfully releasing a record of immense public interest.

Even if the website was taken down because of agency concerns about a separate FOIA release, these internal emails reek of unlawful, partisan interference in the agency’s FOIA office — at the same time Director Tulsi Gabbard was launching a war on leakers and the press. This is more than a technical problem with a FOIA website; it is a cynical attack on accountability.

FPF and CREW sue for Trump’s first-term records

FPF joined Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in a lawsuit to pry open the records of President Donald Trump’s first term. The suit also seeks to establish that federal agencies must abide by the Presidential Records Act, including the provision that presidential papers become subject to release under FOIA five years after the end of the president’s term. The suit follows the Justice Department’s outrageous and unfounded memo claiming that the president no longer needs to follow the PRA — which may be the canary in the coal mine for the government’s preservation of all records, not just those originating from the president.

As I told The New York Times, the DOJ memo “sanctifies” the idea that the president and his officials “get to decide what becomes part of the American story,” which is “fundamentally wrong.”

Transparently yours,

Lauren Harper

Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy
Freedom of the Press Foundation