In light of the “Plymouth Faces Economic Cliff” drumbeat coming from Town Hall (and this publication) of late, I was initially pleased to read in the Boston Globe that a Manomet business had landed a massive contract with a federal agency – hurrah for our tax base! Alas, my congratulatory mood soured quickly when I learned the nature of their pursuit: iris scanning technology for the Department of Homeland Security.
What business is it of mine to object to a lawful enterprise being carried out in our town? Why even raise my concern? In my view, quite conversely, this issue has been forced on our community by the tech firm in question, BI2 (488 State Road). Citizens hesitant to participate in the federal government’s ongoing data-gathering expedition have a right to ask how deeply our townspeople have been drawn into the project. I write today to ask the Plymouth Independent to bring facts about BI2 and their arrangement with DHS to the public.
My negative reaction to this collaboration chimes with a global trend. Last week, Le Monde reports, a French company suffered a furious backlash after its American subsidiary entered a contract with DHS. Seems that European investors are leery about exposing themselves to liabilities associated with international human rights abuses. (Remember the day when we American investors were the ones pulling out over human rights abuses in so-called second- and third-world countries?)
A credulous person might be forgiven for advancing the notion that iris scans would make us all safer by ensuring ICE agents would arrest and hold only actual criminals, i.e., individuals with outstanding judicial warrants. However, DHS’ widely reported behavior, as well as some unintentionally honest statements, demonstrate otherwise. By looking a certain way, you are subject to seizure and unlimited detention; by looking atICE activities a certain way, images of your domestic-terrorist irises will soon be residing in a “nice little data base,” in the phrase of an ICE agent in Maine last week.
We freedom-loving Americans are not amused by this shredding of Constitutional guarantees and the accelerating establishment of a surveillance state. An overstatement of their intentions? According to the Globe’s reporting, “the contract with BI2 gives ICE unlimited access to the largest national database of iris scans built expressly for law enforcement purposes, federal documents show.” It’s chilling to think that peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights may already be getting lumped into that category by our federal government.
In the words of New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom, “ICE knows that it cannot shoot us all. But the Department of Homeland Security is close to being able to track us all.”
– Paula Marcoux
Editor’s note: The Independent published a story about B12 Technologies and its ICE contract in October.