ICE’s Fortify App: Surveillance Gone Too Far
The short version: The Lab Tech Show exposes ICE's Fortify facial recognition app tapping 200M+ images from DMVs and TSA, raising the same unchecked-surveillance alarms we track with ALPRs.
Our Take
Credit to The Lab Tech Show for digging into Fortify, ICE's facial recognition app that reportedly lets agents snap a photo and pull from a database of over 200 million images sourced from DMV records, TSA Pre-Check, and more. This is the same playbook we see with license plate readers: a surveillance tool gets deployed quietly, expands past its original justification, and ends up running on everyday people in neighborhoods far from any stated mission like border security.
The pattern is familiar. No public vote, no real oversight, and now Congress is reportedly scrambling to ask DHS basic questions about legality and accuracy after the fact. Facial recognition and ALPR networks like Flock's are different technologies but the same philosophy — normalize mass identification first, worry about bias, wrongful arrests, and data retention later. When agencies quietly share access across federal and local lines, your face or your plate can end up in a system you never agreed to be part of.
If Fortify unsettles you, you should know your local police may already be feeding plate data into similar nationwide networks. Check our camera map to see what's watching in your area, and visit our take-action page to push back before these systems become permanent fixtures.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Lab Tech Show, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.