The public Quizlet set contained information about alleged codes for specific facility entrances. 'Checkpoint doors code?' asked one card, with a specific four-digit combination listed in response.
Over the past few years, while applying for security and risk-related roles, I noticed a pattern that surprised me: many background screening vendors only asked for a few years of employment history, minimal address information, minimal educational verification, and returned results within one or two days. In contrast, I also noticed that industries with higher regulatory standards, such as finance and transportation, conduct far deeper checks that can span from weeks to months.
Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show.
Until now, those instructions had to be delivered to each data broker individually - not an easy feat, given that more than 500 brokers were registered in the state as of the end of last year. Making things even more difficult, some brokers obscured their opt-out forms from search results, as The Markup and CalMatters revealed in August. The new system delivers privacy instructions to every registered broker at once.
The Trump administration has since poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, and in March, Trump issued an executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that states have "access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered." In May, DHS began encouraging states to check their voter rolls against immigration data with the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). SAVE now has access to data from across the federal government, not just on immigrants but on citizens as well.