The U.S. State Department is set to launch a program called “Catch and Revoke” that will use AI systems to scan news reports and the social media accounts of students in America on a visa. The goal is to find people with pro-Palestenian and Hamas sympathies and kick them out of the country.
Axios reported the story and detailed how it will work after talking to unnamed officials in the State Department. The unspecified AI will crawl through footage and news reports of protests as well as the social media accounts of 100,000 people who are in America’s Student Exchange Visitor System. It’ll start its crawl on October 7, 2023.
The goal is to find out if any of these student protestors or people with alleged Hamas leanings faced what the Trump administration feels is appropriate punishment. The goal here is to punish anti-Israel protestors who demonstrated on college campuses. “We found literally zero visa revocations during the Biden administration…which suggests a blind eye attitude toward law enforcement,” a State Department official told Axios.
This Trump administration is all-in on using unproven AI systems to help it run the government. Under Elon Musk, DOGE has reportedly used AI to crawl through federal databases to hunt for places to cut spending and people to fire.
The current run of large language models is pretty good at collecting data and bad at sorting it. Every AI system is encoded with the biases of the people who created it; they tend to give users the answers they want rather than an objective view of the data. The systems are also prone to hallucinations and false positives.
The Trump administration is obsessed with policing speech, and perceived support of Palestine is a major taboo. Israel launched a brutal war in Gaza after Hamas attacked the country and killed and kidnapped civilians in 2023. The Israeli military has used AI to help it pick targets and sort through data in the war, a move that some members of the Israeli military have worried led to increased civilian casualties.
Anti-war and pro-Palestine protests swept through many major college campuses as the war ramped up and became a popular talking point among conservative politicians and pundits. After he took office, Trump passed several executive orders he said were aimed at combating anti-semtism on college campuses.
Many of Trump’s executive orders and proposed actions on combating domestic terror threats and fighting antisemitism are overbroad. One of his early executive orders said it was the policy of the U.S. government to protect citizens from people who “espouse hateful ideology” without narrowly defining what that ideology is.
During his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump touted a bill backed by his wife called the “Take it Down Act.” On the surface, the bill is about punishing people who post revenge porn and AI deep fakes. But experts like the Electronic Frontier Foundation worry the bill is overbroad and will allow Trump to silence his critics.
Trump himself hinted at as much during his speech. “The Senate just passed the Take It Down Act,” he said. “Once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law. And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”
Taken together, the Take it Down Act and the use of AI by the State Department to retroactively punish protestors constitutes an attack on free speech and free expression powered by surveillance technology.
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