Final week, a web site referred to as ICE Record went viral after its creators said that they’d obtained what they described as a leak of non-public details about practically 4,500 Department of Homeland Security staff. Nevertheless, a WIRED evaluation of the location discovered that the database depends closely on data that obvious DHS staff have posted publicly on-line themselves. This comes at a time when DHS has characterised reporting on or publicizing the id of ICE officers as “doxing” and has threatened to prosecute perceived offenders to the fullest extent of the legislation.
ICE Record operates as a crowdsourced wiki maintained by volunteers, who’ve discretion over who’s added and what’s marked as “verified.” Like Wikipedia, with which it has no affiliation, ICE Record has class pages that characteristic a hyperlink to each web page included in that class. Not everybody on the listing is an ICE worker and even affiliated with a federal company; former Proud Boys chief Enrique Tarrio, for instance, whom DHS told the Associated Press will not be an ICE agent, is included within the wiki’s “Brokers” class. On his precise web page, his “Company” is listed as “N/A” and his “Position” is listed as “Propagandist; Agitator.” (Tarrio posted on X that he wished he labored for ICE, however referred to as the ICE Record web page disinformation.)
Dominick Skinner, the proprietor of ICE Record, says he doesn’t imagine that what ICE Record does is doxing. ICE Record doesn’t publish the house addresses of recognized brokers, and says on its About web page that “false submissions, harassment, or makes an attempt to misuse the platform will likely be eliminated.”
“If this have been doxing, then we dox ourselves by merely being current in on-line environments,” Skinner says, “which is simply reasonably ridiculous.”
WIRED reviewed people’ pages that have been included within the “Brokers” class on ICE Record as of January 22. Of the 1,580 pages, practically 90 p.c point out LinkedIn as a supply of data, although a number of the hyperlinks cited now look like damaged, and never all the hyperlinks assist claims made on the wiki. (Somebody listed as “energetic” on ICE Record might, for instance, have a LinkedIn depicting them as a former authorized advisor for ICE. On its About web page, ICE Record says that “errors might happen.”) Different linked profiles lack pictures and don’t look like very energetic. Among the hyperlinks, nonetheless, seem to match federal immigration brokers who’ve beforehand been named in official ICE press releases and court docket data.
Like different LinkedIn customers, those that self-identify as ICE deportation officers and different varieties of DHS staff are in lots of circumstances posting New 12 months’s resolutions, reacting to meandering motivational posts in regards to the which means of management, and letting folks know they’re #opentowork.
The DHS didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Some people’ pages on the ICE Record wiki cite OpenPayrolls, a searchable database of public staff’ salaries that features some ICE staff, and SignalHire, a knowledge dealer that makes a speciality of lead era, as sources of data.
A spokesperson for OpenPayrolls wrote in an e mail that it has no affiliation with ICE Record and that the ICE-related payroll data on its web site have been launched by the US Workplace of Personnel Administration in response to a Freedom of Info Act request. The spokesperson additionally mentioned, “Thus far, now we have not obtained outreach from any authorities company expressing considerations relating to the show of public data on our transparency web site.”
SignalHire didn’t reply to a request for remark, but it surely additionally contains direct hyperlinks to the LinkedIn profiles of individuals representing themselves as ICE officers on its web site.
