Campus Reform was the first to report that Kyle McDonald, an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) from 2011 to 2016, is promoting ICESpy.org on X.
On his LinkedIn account, McDonald boasts his "sneaky interventions" and his exploration of how to "misuse" new technologies to "create confusion" and "build alternative futures."
Though he recognizes that threatening federal employees is a felony, his new app uses facial recognition to identify people who work with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In his words, it is "designed to highlight and embarrass the organization committing atrocities against refugees and immigrants to the United States."
"The tool is allowing users to upload pictures, and then it tells them the ICE agents' names, their job titles, their locations," relays Emily Sturge, a Campus Reform reporter.
The website cross references those photos against hundreds of LinkedIn profiles.
Sturge asserts this website, created at a time when the Department of Homeland Security says assaults on ICE agents have skyrocketed nearly 700% in just the last year, is "really, really dangerous."
"It's putting their lives in jeopardy, and it's enabling, it's emboldening those anti-ICE activists to go after ICE agents who … are fathers, they are mothers, they're brothers, they're sisters," she laments.
McDonald appears to recognize this but reasons that "evil is built on the back of people in boring jobs 'just following orders.'" He says it is time for people to follow their "inner moral compass."
Sturge mentions some recent examples of violence against ICE agents.
"In one situation, 10 people were arrested on attempted murder charges after opening fire outside of an immigration center in Alvarado, Texas," she notes. "In another situation, another gunman in Texas opened fire at a Border Patrol center in McAllen, Texas."
She says McDonald's website is part of a wider pattern of anti-law enforcement radicalism her team has noticed in the higher education system.
