The State Council will use AI to search for “relatives” students to be deported
The U.S. State Department will launch a program called Capture and Revocation, which will use AI systems to scan news coverage and social media accounts for U.S. students on visas. The goal is to find people with pro-Pastan and Hamas sympathy and drive them out of the country.
Axios reported the story and detailed how he worked after talking to an unnamed official in the State Department. Unspecified AI will crawl through protests and news coverage and social media accounts of 100,000 people in the U.S. student exchange visitor system. It will crawl from October 7, 2023.
The goal is to find out whether these student protesters or those who allegedly Hamas tend to face punishments that the Trump administration considers appropriate. The goal here is to punish anti-Israel protesters who demonstrate on university campuses. “We found that during the Biden administration, it was actually a zero visa revocation … which shows a gaze toward law enforcement,” a State Department official told Axios.
The Trump administration is all out using unproven AI systems to help it manage the administration. Under Elon Musk, Doge reportedly crawled through federal databases using AI to find places to cut spending and people fire.
Currently, large language models run very well at collecting data and are not good at classifying them. Every AI system has a biased encoding of the people who created it; they tend to give users the answers they need, rather than an objective view of the data. These systems are also prone to hallucinations and false alarms.
The Trump administration is obsessed with policing rhetoric, and support for Palestine is a major taboo. Israel launched a brutal war in Gaza after Hamas attacked the country in 2023 and killed and kidnapped civilians.
As the war intensified, anti-war and pro-Palestinian protests swept through many major university campuses and became a popular topic among conservative politicians and experts. After taking office, Trump passed several executive orders that he said were intended to combat anti-separatism on university campuses.
Many of Trump’s execution orders and the actions proposed to combat family terrorist threats and combat anti-Semitism are excessive. His early execution order said that the U.S. government’s policy was to protect citizens from people who “protect hatred ideology” without narrowly defining what this ideology is.
Speaking at a joint meeting of Congress on Tuesday, Trump touted a bill supported by his wife, known as the “Knockdown Act.” On the surface, the bill is about punishing people who avenge porn and artificial intelligence deep fakes. But experts like the Electronic Border Foundation are worried that the bill will allow Trump to keep critics silent.
Trump himself made many hints in his speech. “The Senate just passed the Beat Act,” he said. “Once I pass the house, I look forward to signing the bill into law. If you don’t mind, I will use the bill for myself, too, because no one will do worse than I do online, no one.”
To sum up, the adoption of AI by the State Council retroactively punishing protesters constitutes an attack on freedom of speech and free expression powered by surveillance technology.
