ICE has been mining state driver's license databases using controversial facial recognition technology

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has turned states' driver's license databases "into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans' photos without their knowledge or consent," The Washington Post reports, citing new documents unearthed by Georgetown Law researchers using public-records requests. The federal use of DMV photos as part of "the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure" violates some state and local laws, likely impinges on privacy rights, and has raised rare bipartisan hackles.

"This is a scandal," Harrison Rudolph, an associate at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology, tells The New York Times. "States have never passed laws authorizing ICE to dive into driver's license databases using facial recognition to look for folks," and they've "never told undocumented people that when they apply for a driver's license they are also turning over their face to ICE. That is a huge bait and switch." The FBI has also conducted more than 390,000 searches through DMV and visa application photos over the past decade, a recent Government Accountability Office report found.

The researchers found evidence that ICE had requested access to DMV photos in Vermont, Utah, and Washington State databases from 2014 to 2017, and officials in Utah and Vermont handed over facial recognition access in response to just an emailed request. It's not clear if those states still cooperate with ICE, though an ICE spokesman defended his agency's general "ability to collaborate with external local, federal, and international agencies to obtain information that may assist in case completion and subsequent prosecution."

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The House Homeland Security Committee is holding a hearing Wednesday on the Homeland Security Department's use of facial recognition, and the top Democrat and Republican on the House Oversight Committee are both upset over federal law enforcement's use of the error-prone, hackable surveillance technology on driver's license photos. You can explore some of the issues with facial recognition in the Post video report below. Peter Weber