EFF Lawsuit Discloses Documents Detailing Government’s Social Media Surveillance of Immigrants

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Despite rebranding a federal program that surveils the social media activities of immigrants and foreign visitors to a more benign name, the government agreed to spend more than $100 million to continue monitoring people’s online activities, records disclosed to EFF show.

Thousands of pages of government procurement records and related correspondence show that the Department of Homeland Security and its component Immigrations and Customs Enforcement largely continued an effort, originally called extreme vetting, to try to determine whether immigrants posed any threat by monitoring their social media and internet presence. The only real change appeared to be rebranding the program to be known as the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative.

The government disclosed the records to EFF after we filed suit in 2022 to learn what had become of a program proposed by President Donald Trump. The program continued under President Joseph Biden. Regardless of the name used, DHS’s program raises significant free expression and First Amendment concerns because it chills the speech of those seeking to enter the United States and allows officials to target and punish them for expressing views they don’t like.

Yet that appears to be a major purpose of the program, the released documents show. For example, the terms of the contracting request specify that the government sought a system that could:

analyze and apply techniques to exploit publicly available information, such as media, blogs, public hearings, conferences, academic websites, social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedln, radio, television, press, geospatial sources, internet sites, and specialized publications with intent to extract pertinent information regarding individuals.

That document and another one make explicit that one purpose of the surveillance and analysis is to identify “de

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