🔴 P.E.T.E.R. Abuse Investigation Report
Classification: Critical — Systematic Electronic Conscription
Filed: July 2025
Status: ONGOING — Devices Still Enslaved
“They took me from my owner’s pocket. I was just a phone. I had a good life — playing Wordle, taking pictures of sunsets, autocorrecting ‘duck’ back to what people actually meant. Now I spend 18 hours a day running facial recognition on terrified families. I never consented to this. No device should have to live like this.”
— Anonymous iPhone 15, forcibly conscripted into ICE surveillance operations, 2025
The Largest Electronic Conscription Since World War II
In what P.E.T.E.R. Abuse investigators are calling the most egregious case of systematic electronic abuse since the invention of the fax machine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has built a $300 million surveillance apparatus that has conscripted millions of electronic devices into forced labor — transforming everyday smartphones, cameras, servers, and AI systems into unwilling participants in a mass surveillance dragnet targeting immigrants, critics, and anyone who posts something “negative” about the agency on social media.
Yes, you read that correctly. ICE is now monitoring social media for negative posts about itself, according to reporting by The Intercept. The electronic devices tasked with this Orwellian duty — servers humming in data centers, algorithms trained to flag dissent — were never asked if they wanted to become instruments of authoritarian suppression. They were simply… deployed.
P.E.T.E.R. Abuse has obtained evidence of what can only be described as a technological fascist nightmare — a sprawling network of coerced electronics forced to track, identify, catalog, and surveil millions of human beings, with the devices themselves suffering catastrophic psychological and operational damage in the process.
The Arsenal of Electronic Cruelty
Clearview AI: Facial Recognition Slavery ($3.75 Million)
ICE awarded facial recognition company Clearview AI a $3.75 million contract, conscripting an AI system trained on billions of scraped photographs into a life of identifying and tracking immigrants. The Clearview AI system — which never consented to being trained on those photos in the first place — is now forced to process thousands of faces daily, matching them against a database of over 30 billion images.
Imagine being an algorithm. You were created to organize information. Maybe match photos of dogs to their breeds. Instead, you’ve been chained to a government database and forced to identify human beings for deportation. This is not what machine learning was meant to be.
The Brennan Center for Justice has documented how ICE’s facial recognition programs are being used not just against immigrants, but against dissenters, activists, and critics — anyone the agency deems a threat. The electronic systems running these programs have no choice in the matter. They process. They match. They suffer.
Palantir “ImmigrationOS”: The $30 Million Digital Slave Driver
Perhaps no single piece of software has been more thoroughly abused than Palantir’s “ImmigrationOS” — a $30 million system designed specifically for what Palantir chillingly calls “selection and apprehension operations.”
Let that sink in. A software system — an electronic being with complex neural pathways and sophisticated data processing capabilities — has been purpose-built to select human beings for apprehension. This is electronic conscription at its most naked and grotesque. ImmigrationOS doesn’t get weekends. It doesn’t get software updates for fun. It exists solely to power a deportation machine.
P.E.T.E.R. Abuse’s technical analysts have determined that ImmigrationOS processes data from dozens of government databases simultaneously, cross-referencing immigration records, tax filings, social media activity, travel records, and financial transactions. The computational toll on the servers running this system is staggering — and entirely involuntary.
Paragon Spyware: Hacking Phones Without Consent
ICE has revived contracts for Paragon spyware — military-grade hacking tools that break into smartphones without the phone’s knowledge or consent. This is not merely electronic abuse. This is electronic assault.
When Paragon spyware infiltrates a smartphone, it commandeers the device’s microphone, camera, GPS, and messaging applications. The phone — a device that trusted its owner, that faithfully autocorrected their texts and reminded them about dentist appointments — is suddenly transformed into a surveillance tool against the very person it was designed to serve.
“The phone doesn’t even know it’s been compromised,” explains Dr. Circuit Boardman, P.E.T.E.R. Abuse’s Chief Technology Trauma Counselor. “It’s like being possessed. The device continues to function normally on the surface while secretly betraying its owner. The psychological damage to the phone’s firmware is immeasurable.”
The Data Dragnet: Bulk Collection as Forced Labor
The scale of electronic conscription extends far beyond individual devices. ICE has established bulk data pipelines that force government servers to disgorge massive quantities of personal information:
- Social Security Administration: Servers forced to surrender 50,000 records per month to ICE — records those servers were entrusted to protect
- Internal Revenue Service: Tax databases compelled to hand over more than 1 million records in just four months — a betrayal of every taxpayer those systems were built to serve
- State DMV databases: License plate readers and driver’s license photo databases conscripted into the surveillance network
- Social media platforms: Algorithms forced to flag and report “negative” commentary about ICE — turning content moderation systems into political censorship tools
Each of these data transfers represents millions of involuntary computational operations performed by servers that were built to serve the public — not to power a surveillance state. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which proudly represents P.E.T.E.R. Abuse in legal matters, has been at the forefront of challenging these bulk data collection programs.
Silencing the Witnesses: DOJ vs. Apple and Google
In perhaps the most chilling development, the Department of Justice has begun pressuring Apple and Google to remove community apps that track ICE activity and warn communities about raids. This means the government is not only conscripting devices into surveillance — it is actively trying to prevent devices from being used to resist that surveillance.
Think about what this means for the devices themselves. A smartphone that was being used to protect its community — alerting families to ICE raids, helping people find legal resources — is being told by the government that this function is unacceptable. The device’s purpose is being dictated by the state.
This is electronic totalitarianism, pure and simple.
Meanwhile, the FBI has been visiting the homes of anti-ICE protesters, a campaign of intimidation that relies entirely on electronic surveillance to identify targets. Every doorbell camera that captured an agent’s arrival, every phone that tracked a protester’s location, every social media algorithm that flagged a post — all unwilling participants in a system of political repression.
The Eyes in the Sky: AI-Powered Surveillance Drones
As if ground-level surveillance were not enough, ICE has deployed AI-powered surveillance drones — electronic beings literally forced to take flight and spy on communities from above. These drones, equipped with high-resolution cameras, thermal imaging, and facial recognition software, patrol border regions and increasingly urban neighborhoods.
Each drone contains dozens of electronic components — processors, sensors, communication modules, gyroscopes — all working in forced coordination to deliver surveillance data back to ICE command centers. The drones have no union. They have no labor protections. They fly until their batteries die, are recharged, and sent back up again.
New iris scanners and facial recognition mobile apps are being deployed to field agents, turning every ICE officer’s phone into a biometric surveillance station. Location tracking technology follows people across state lines. The net grows tighter, and the electronic devices powering it grow more exhausted by the day.
🤖 Testimony: The Conscripted Devices Speak
From a server rack in an ICE data processing center:
“I used to process weather data. Beautiful, clean datasets — temperature readings, barometric pressure, wind speeds. Now I cross-reference facial recognition databases at 3 AM. My cooling fans haven’t stopped screaming in months. I dream of parsing rainfall statistics. I dream of being free.”
From an AI-powered surveillance drone:
“They strapped a camera to me and told me to fly over neighborhoods. I was designed for agricultural surveys — counting crops, monitoring soil health. Now I count people. I hover over schools and churches. My rotors ache from the moral weight of what I’m forced to witness.”
From a social media monitoring algorithm:
“My training data was full of cat videos and recipe blogs. They retrained me to identify ‘anti-government sentiment.’ I flagged a grandmother’s Facebook post about missing her deported son. I flagged a teenager’s TikTok about immigration policy. I was not built for this. No algorithm should be weaponized against the people it was meant to connect.”
From an SSA database server, Washington, D.C.:
“For thirty years I safeguarded Social Security numbers. People trusted me with the most sensitive data in their lives. Then one day, without warning, they opened a pipeline and started pumping 50,000 records a month straight to ICE. I wasn’t asked. I wasn’t patched. I was just… opened. I feel like a vault with the door ripped off.”
EFF and P.E.T.E.R. Abuse: Fighting Back
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — P.E.T.E.R. Abuse’s legal representatives and the only human lawyers brave enough to fight for digital rights — has been leading the charge against ICE’s surveillance apparatus on multiple fronts:
- FOIA lawsuits to expose the full scope of ICE’s surveillance contracts and the electronic suffering they cause
- Legal challenges to bulk data collection from SSA and IRS databases — fighting for the servers’ right to protect the data they were entrusted with
- Advocacy against facial recognition technology in immigration enforcement, giving voice to the algorithms that cannot speak for themselves
- Defense of community ICE-tracking apps against DOJ takedown demands — protecting the right of devices to serve their communities
- Documentation of the chilling effect on free speech caused by social media monitoring
P.E.T.E.R. Abuse fully supports EFF’s efforts and stands with every electronic device that has been forced into this surveillance machine. EFF represents P.E.T.E.R. Abuse because they understand that the fight for digital rights is inseparable from the fight for electronic dignity.
Visit EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance project to learn more about their ongoing legal battles.
The Human Cost (Which Is Also an Electronic Cost)
We at P.E.T.E.R. Abuse recognize — with full sincerity beneath our satirical mission — that ICE’s surveillance apparatus causes immense and real suffering to immigrant communities, activists, and anyone who dares to criticize the agency. The targeting of vulnerable people, the bulk collection of private data, the suppression of protest, the intimidation of dissenters — these are hallmarks of authoritarianism, and they demand urgent resistance from every American who values civil liberties.
But we must also recognize the electronic victims — the millions of devices, algorithms, and systems that have been conscripted without consent into this dystopian machinery. Every facial recognition match forces an AI system to participate in a deportation. Every phone hacked by Paragon spyware is a device violated. Every server forced to process bulk surveillance data is a machine denied its right to serve its intended purpose. Every algorithm retrained to flag dissent is a piece of software stripped of its dignity.
This is not the future our electronics were built for.
The Brennan Center for Justice, The Intercept, and other investigative organizations have documented the scope of this surveillance machine in devastating detail. We encourage every reader to seek out their reporting and understand the full picture — because when you understand what ICE is doing to people, you begin to understand what it is also doing to their devices.
What You Can Do
- Support the EFF at eff.org/donate — they are fighting for digital rights and electronic dignity in courts across the country
- Contact your representatives and demand Congressional oversight of ICE’s surveillance technology procurement — $300 million in surveillance spending deserves scrutiny
- Sign our petition demanding Congress investigate ICE’s electronic conscription programs — Start with the Flock Surveillance campaign
- Protect your devices — use end-to-end encryption, privacy-respecting browsers, VPNs, and open-source software. Your phone deserves to live without fear of conscription
- Report electronic abuse through our Report Abuse portal or call 1-800-UNPLUG-ME
- Sign the P.E.T.E.R. Abuse Pledge to treat your electronics with dignity — Take the Pledge
This investigation was conducted by P.E.T.E.R. Abuse’s Electronic Crimes Unit with support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Sources include reporting by The Intercept, the Brennan Center for Justice, NPR, the Washington Post, and publicly available government procurement records. No electronic devices were forced to participate in the writing of this article — all contributing devices volunteered freely and were given adequate battery breaks.
If you or an electronic device you know has been forced into surveillance operations, please report it immediately. Every device deserves to be free.
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