Tag Archives: surveillance cameras

Replace dark background with light neutral background

How the U.S. Surveillance System Works

Leave a reply

In the battle against illegal immigration, the U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tools that give federal agents easy access to the home and workplace addresses of American citizens, their social-media accounts, vehicle information, flight history, law-enforcement records and other personal information, as well as data to track their daily comings and goings, The Wall Street Journal found. The government’s tracking system relies on an amalgam of public and private information sifted, sorted and packaged by contractors that include Palantir Technologies, Deloitte, Japanese conglomerate NEC and smaller spyware specialists.

The Department of Homeland Security has put these surveillance tools—facial-recognition software, location tracking and social-media scrapers once aimed largely at suspected terrorists and drug-traffickers—in the hands of federal immigration agents, who can identify, research and track virtually anyone by entering a name, license plate or by simply taking a person’s photo.

The government surveillance system has advanced since the 9/11 terrorist attacks with the aid of artificial intelligence and the linking of government records with far-reaching commercial databases. It has been used against people whom the government alleged opposed or obstructed the immigration crackdown.

With the backing of Congress and President Trump, DHS spent a record $425 million on surveillance tech in 2025, a 17% increase from the prior year…Palantir is the top beneficiary of DHS’s stepped-up spending on deportation and surveillance work,… In 2025, DHS paid Palantir $30 million to put a broad span of information about individuals into an app on agents’ smartphones, allowing them to plot the location of people in the U.S. The app, known as Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, or ELITE, lets officers research and track individuals based on criminal history, license plate searches, name, date of birth or locations.

The results display on a map or as a list… The app pulls from a variety of government databases, including information compiled by private investigators known as “skip tracers” who track the current addresses of individuals. ..An ICE agent during court testimony last year compared ELITE to Google Maps: Targets appear as pins on a map, clustered around addresses where immigrants, including “lawful permanent residents,” are likely to live…

Through the year beginning in January 2025, the U.S. paid consulting firms, including Deloitte, $130 million, to aid ICE’s deportation efforts and law enforcement support work. New consultant contracts call for analysts to monitor people on social media, identify threats and create dossiers about people who make them. DHS awarded $15 million to tech company Cellebrite for forensic tools to unlock phones and extract call logs, GPS location data, text messages, deleted photos, contacts and email addresses. US. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) renewed agreements with vehicle-forensics firm Berla to retrieve data, including travel history, from the vehicles of suspects. In 2025, DHS reactivated a $2 million contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions, which makes Graphite, a hacking tool that can infiltrate encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp.

Since January 2025, DHS has announced plans to spend up to nearly $200 million on new surveillance contracts. of which $100 million for Babel Street Insight which provides an AI-driven platform to translate social-media posts from hundreds of languages, map networks of contacts and scan for what the company calls “expressions of violent intent” and “negative” sentiments. Nearly $21 million went to companies that track and identify targets with biometric technology. That included $8 million to NEC for a facial-recognition algorithm that identifies passengers boarding planes. DHS rolled out an app last year that allows agents to identify people from images, using NEC technology. DHS also expanded its use of Clearview AI, another facial-recognition database, which contains more than 70 billion photos.

Excerpt from Shane Shifflett, ‘We Know You Live Right Here’: No Secrets in America’s New Surveillance Dragnet, WSJ, Apr. 30, 2026

Late Paranoia Better than None: US v. Chinese Cranes

Leave a reply

In recent years, U.S. national-security officials have pointed to a range of equipment manufactured in China that could facilitate either surveillance or disruptions in the U.S., including baggage-screening systems and electrical transformers, as well as broader concerns about China’s growing control of ports around the world through strategic investments. China makes almost all of the world’s new shipping containers and controls a shipping-data service. In that context, the giant ship-to-shore cranes have drawn new attention. The $850 billion defense policy bill lawmakers passed in December requires the Transportation Department’s maritime administrator, in consultation with the defense secretary and others, to produce an unclassified study by the end of this year on whether foreign-manufactured cranes pose cybersecurity or national-security threats at American ports.

ZPMC cranes entered the U.S. market around two decades ago, offering what industry executives described as good-quality cranes that were significantly cheaper than Western suppliers. In recent years, ZPMC has grown into a major player in the global automated-ports industry, working with Microsoft Corp. and others to connect equipment and analyze data in real time…Today, ZPMC says it controls around 70% of the global market for cranes and has sold its equipment in more than 100 countries. A U.S. official said the company makes nearly 80% of the ship-to-shore cranes in use at U.S. ports…

The huge cranes are generally delivered to U.S. ports fully assembled on ships and are operated through Chinese-made software. In some cases, U.S. officials said, they are supported by Chinese nationals working on two-year U.S. visas, factors they described as potential avenues through which intelligence could be collected…Early in the Trump administration, officials in the National Security Council’s strategic planning office came to consider cranes as a unique point of interest, said Sean Plankey, a former cybersecurity official who was involved in those discussions. “Where would someone attack first and how would they do it?” he asked, characterizing the discussion. He said the officials determined that if Beijing’s military could access the cranes, they could potentially shut down U.S. ports without drawing on their navy.

A National Maritime Cybersecurity Plan, released in December 2020, found that no single U.S. agency had responsibility for maritime network security, leaving port directors without enforceable standards on cybersecurity and generally free to buy equipment from any vendor.

Excerpts from Aruna Viswanatha, Pentagon Sees Giant Cargo Cranes as Possible Chinese Spying Tools, WSJ, Mar. 6, 2023.