In a retaliation effort against the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, an NYU professor gathered and posted the names of more than 1,500 ICE agents online.
He even posted about it on Twitter.
Direct link to the data set here: https://t.co/ijviuwlnfe
— Sam Lavigne (@sam_lavigne) June 19, 2018
The database he created has since been blocked by GitHub.
I scraped LinkedIn for people that work for ICE: https://t.co/MJuuyMeAal
— Sam Lavigne (@sam_lavigne) June 19, 2018
Now, Twitter and other online platforms are shutting down efforts to reveal the names of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees.
Sam Lavigne, who says he is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, created a database on GitHub with information that he gathered from the LinkedIn business networking site, Fox News reported last week.
The database on GitHub has since been deleted by the platform on the grounds of “doxxing,” or the intentional publication of personal information.
Anti-Trump professor thwarted in bid to share ICE employee data #FNTech https://t.co/hZEeVxIzic
— Fox News SciTech (@FoxNewsTech) June 20, 2018
According to his website, Lavigne is “currently an Adjunct Professor at ITP/NYU, The New School, and the School for Poetic Computation, a 2016/2017 Magic Grant fellow at the Brown Institute at Columbia University, and is Special Projects editor at the New Inquiry Magazine.
Lavigne justified his actions and said: “As ICE continues to ramp up its inhumane surveillance and detention efforts, I believe it’s important to document what’s happening, and by whom, in any way we can.”
GitHub explained in a statement why it removed the information about ICE agents: “We removed the project because it violates our community guidelines. In general, we have policies against use of GitHub for doxing and harassment, and violating a third party’s privacy.”
Lavigne said: “The information is already out there, and if people want to embark on individual campaigns of harassment, then they’re going to be doing that no matter what.”
