Republican senator targets overseas facial recognition site over ICE doxing

When Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a stalwart supporter of Donald Trump, sent a sharply worded letter Wednesday to Giorgi Gobronidze, the CEO of PimEyes, it was not simply an inquiry about how one of the world’s most controversial facial recognition companies operates. It was also a signal of her broader legislative strategy.

PimEyes, is owned by EMEARobotics, a corporation based in Dubai. Gobronidze is the owner and CEO of EMEARobotics and PimEyes and is based in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Blackburn is working to bring to bear public and political pressure against technologies that can expose federal law enforcement officers to online harassment while also advancing a bill that would criminalize the publication of those officers’ names when tied to obstructing official operations.

The two initiatives intersect at a moment when the proliferation of open-access face-search tools has made it easier than ever for activists to pierce anonymity, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents their principal targets of late.

As the Trump administration has accelerated its crackdown on undocumented immigrants – which at times has swept up U.S. citizens, Green Card holders, and immigrants waiting to have their cases adjudicated – it not surprisingly has spurred a wave of digital resistance.

Blackburn’s letter to Gobronidze, cites recent reports that activists have used PimEyes to identify ICE personnel. The senator’s language is not merely cautionary, it is also accusatory, painting a picture of a platform that has failed to police its own rules and is being weaponized in ways that endanger U.S. officers and their families. At least that is Blackburn’s position.

“PimEyes has purported that this technology can assist in public safety by locating dangerous offenders. This, in the carefully trained hands of law enforcement, is true. However, a publicly accessible digital library of individuals’ lives and likenesses in the wrong hands poses unthinkable risks,” Blackburn said.

PimEyes advertises its services as available for “personal use only,” but Blackburn pressed the company in her letter to explain how that restriction is enforced when its features appear to lend themselves to abuse.

Blackburn says sites like “ICE List,” run by Dutch activist Dominick Skinner, have already leveraged publicly available images and commercial search tools to compile databases of officers’ names, partial photographs, and in some cases links to their social media. The professional social media site LinkedIn has been found to be a good source for photographs of many government officials, as well as contact information.

Similarly, commercial data brokers who sell access to databases of Americans’ personally identifiable information have also come under congressional scrutiny following the fatal shooting of two Minnesota state lawmakers whose home addresses and other identifying information was obtained from online personal information websites.

What was once a difficult and resource-intensive task of connecting a blurred or partially masked face to a real-world identity has, Blackburn argues, been dramatically simplified by PimEyes’ technology.

The dangers of public facial recognition systems were revealed last year when two Harvard students converted Meta’s smart glasses into a device that automatically captures people’s faces and runs them through face biometric search engines, allowing them to find people’s names, phone numbers, home addresses and more in under two minutes.

Within a month of the incident, PimeEyes received 53 queries for API integration. During the whole previous year, it received only seven. As of June, PimEyes blocked more than 150 accounts for violating the company’s Terms of Service. The accounts were identified by analyzing search patterns.

The questions she posed to the company reveal her underlying concern that the platform’s design all but invites misuse. She asked the company’s CEO whether PimEyes knows of activist groups or other organizations using its services to “publicly shame” or endanger U.S. officers; whether the firm has any practical enforcement mechanism to prevent users from uploading photos of others without consent; and how it ensures that the “personal use” restriction is anything more than boilerplate in its terms of service.

Blackburn zeroed in on PimEyes features like its paid “Open Plus” alerts which notify subscribers when new images of a target appear online, and the ability to trace search results back to original source websites. Together, she warned, these features could facilitate stalking, trafficking, or harassment campaigns.

Her letter also highlighted PimEyes’ opt-out process, which requires individuals to upload government identification to have their images removed. Blackburn suggested that this mechanism perversely obligates people to hand over even more sensitive personal data in exchange for an uncertain measure of privacy.

Gobronidze told Biometric Update earlier this year that the company receives approximately 390 photo deletion requests per day and in the first half of this year it handled nearly 582,000 takedown requests, with 58 percent successfully deleted.

PimEyes has also introduced safeguards against misuse and requires users to confirm they are of legal age and have a legal right to perform a search. Since June, PimEyes has blocked more than 150 accounts for violating the company’s Terms of Service.

By Blackburn’s account, PimEyes has democratized capabilities that once belonged only to intelligence agencies, and the effect has been to blur the line between accountability and harassment.

The senator has given the company until September 24 to respond in full to her questions.

Her push did not arise in a vacuum. It is tightly linked to legislation she introduced earlier this summer, the Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act, which seeks to make it a federal crime to publish the name of a federal law enforcement officer when done with the intent to obstruct an investigation or immigration operation.

The bill would amend 18 U.S.C. §1510, the federal obstruction statute, to explicitly cover immigration enforcement operations. Violators could face penalties of up to five years in prison.

Blackburn argued that the measure is necessary to fill a gap in existing law. While statutes already criminalize publishing home addresses or phone numbers of federal officers with intent to threaten or incite violence, they do not explicitly criminalize making names public with obstructive intent.

The introduction of the bill was accompanied by a public clash with local officials. Blackburn pointed to an incident in Nashville in which the city’s mayor allegedly published ICE agents’ names following a joint enforcement action. She called the disclosure reckless, formally requested U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the mayor, and presented her bill as a corrective measure.

“This is about protecting the men and women who risk their lives to keep our communities safe,” she said at the time. “Publishing their names with the intent of obstructing their work crosses a line that endangers national security.”

Together, her letter to PimEyes and her legislation form a two-track strategy. One avenue pressures a specific vendor whose business model illustrates the larger problem of open-access facial recognition; the other seeks a statutory backstop to criminalize what she characterizes as obstructive doxing.

Both reflect a growing tension in the U.S. between the transparency demanded by activists and journalists and the secrecy sought by agencies that argue anonymity is essential for officer safety.

The debate, however, is fraught with constitutional stakes. Civil liberties advocates warn that Blackburn’s legislation risks chilling lawful speech and undermining press freedoms. They point out that federal law enforcement officers are public officials, often operating in public spaces, and that the public has a legitimate interest in knowing who is exercising coercive government power.

Critics have characterized the bill as an attempt to create a “secret police,” where government agents can act without public accountability. The First Amendment, they argue, protects the publication of truthful information about government officials, and any carve-out that criminalizes disclosure of names, even with an intent element, sets a dangerous precedent.

Blackburn and her supporters counter that the legislation is narrowly tailored. It does not forbid the press from reporting on officers, they say, nor does it criminalize every instance of naming a federal agent. The offense is triggered only when prosecutors can prove that the disclosure was made “with the intent to obstruct” an investigation or operation.

In practice, this means that journalists writing about misconduct would not face liability, but activists publishing names to disrupt an ICE raid might. Still, the evidentiary line between public accountability and obstruction is thin, and opponents believe it invites prosecutorial overreach.

The conflict over PimEyes only sharpens this tension. On the one hand, the company’s defenders say that face-search tools democratize access to information and can empower ordinary people to protect themselves.

On the other hand, critics emphasize that these same tools allow bad actors to identify individuals against their will, stripping away anonymity in ways that can lead to harassment or violence.

Blackburn’s letter underscores the risks to law enforcement, but the broader societal stakes encompass stalking victims, political dissidents, and anyone whose image can be scraped from the web.

The “ICE List” project illustrates both sides of the coin. Its organizers claim they are engaged in legitimate activism, exposing officers who they believe are complicit in human rights violations at the border. By publishing names and social profiles, they argue, they are holding power to account.

Federal officials and lawmakers like Blackburn see the site differently. They see it as a database that paints targets on the backs of officers and their families.

Blackburn’s initiative also places her at odds with other lawmakers who have called for greater transparency. Senator Cory Booker, for example, has pressed for requirements that officers keep their faces visible and their identities clear during public arrests, arguing that accountability depends on knowing who is exercising government power.

Such proposals pull in the opposite direction from Blackburn’s, highlighting the unresolved question of how much anonymity government law enforcement officers are entitled to in a democratic society.

The PimEyes controversy fits into a larger policy debate about regulating commercial facial recognition. While some states, such as Illinois and California, have imposed strict biometric privacy laws, federal regulation remains fragmented. Companies like PimEyes operate in a gray zone, where their services can be used for both benign personal searches and harmful surveillance.

Further, it is not clear those state laws apply to PimEyes: Gobronidze tells Biometric Update that subjects are identified not through biometric data matching but through precise photographic similarity analysis. And an attorney representing Illinois residents unsuccessfully attempted to serve the company notice of a BIPA suit for two years, searching for company representatives in Georgia, Dubai and Belize, according to NPR.

For its part, PimEyes is expanding its portfolio with the introduction of a service that will allow users to search for faces in billions of online videos.

Blackburn’s letter suggests a potential appetite in Congress to scrutinize the design choices of these platforms, particularly features like automated alerts and reverse-linking that facilitate tracking.

For now, Blackburn’s focus remains on ICE officers and the activists who target them. By tying PimEyes to her legislation, she has created a narrative that links the technological vulnerabilities of facial recognition with the legal gaps she believes her bill will close.

Article Topics

biometric matching  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  ICE  |  law enforcement  |  PimEyes  |  U.S. Government