Report: New York University Professor Releases Database of ICE Employees’ Personal Information

In this Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017, photo released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Charles Reed/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement via AP/File

An adjunct professor at New York University released a database with the personal information of 1,595 ICE employees this week, according to a report from the Daily Caller.

New York University adjunct Sam Lavigne released private personal information for 1,595 ICE employees this week. Shortly after Lavigne released the information, his accounts on both Medium and GitHub were suspended for violating both platform’s terms of service.

In the since removed Medium post, Lavigne said that he hoped the personal information, which included the full name and city for each ICE employee would be “useful” to researchers and activists.

“I’ve downloaded and made available the profiles of (almost) everyone on LinkedIn who works for ICE, 1,595 people in total. While I don’t have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set, I leave it here with the hope that researchers, journalists, and activists will find it useful,” Lavigne wrote in the post.

Lavigne posted the information to a repository on his GitHub account, which has since been suspended. A GitHub spokesperson said that Lavigne violated the company’s policy against doxing and harassment.

“We removed the project because it violates our community guidelines,” the spokesperson said. “In general, we have policies against use of GitHub for doxxing and harassment, and violating a third party’s privacy.”

Lavigne, an artist, is also an adjunct professor at The New School. In 2016-2017, he was a Magic Grant fellow at the Brown Institute at Columbia University. He serves as the Special Projects editor for New Inquiry Magazine. His art has been put on display at Lincoln Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His New York University faculty page says that his areas of focus are “data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation.”

Breitbart News reached out to New York University for comment on Lavigne’s unusual activism efforts but did not receive a response.

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