Tag Archives: surveillance contractors

Armored steampunk truck with multiple cameras and lights on a rocky mountain road at night.

Who Empowers Mass Surveillance in the United States

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In the United States, the rapid acceleration of AI in border-security technology hit a fever pitch over in 2025-26 bringing new competitors into the industry and offering a new vision of what surveillance and border enforcement looks like. The Trump administration has made border security and immigration enforcement its top priority, and vendors have been eager to secure funding and contracts before political winds shift. Paul Allen, president of Airship AI, a surveillance intelligence system, said the administration’s emphasis on securing the border has led companies serving other sectors to begin applying their technologies to border security.

Even Amazon.com is getting in on the border-security game, displaying a tricked-out pickup truck equipped with systems to provide mobile monitoring of people or border threats via drones or other inputs. Representatives said the truck is a prototype of what Amazon could offer DHS. They added that the vehicle hasn’t been deployed to the border yet. The company has a specialized email account set up to recruit DHS business.

Most of the technology on display was autonomous and AI-equipped….Representatives of WilliamsRDM—whose products include solar panels that power covert cameras while disguised as rocks and litter—said the power demands of AI-linked systems are increasing the need for their products.

The government has touted technology as a way to find and apprehend potential smugglers and immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, saying it is more efficient than human power and, in some cases, less invasive than a physical border wall. Others have cried foul on what they see as dystopian Big Brother surveillance that is being rolled out with little public understanding and oversight.

Excerpt from Elizabeth Findell, Tump’s Border Spending Spurs Boom in AI-Infused Surveillance, WSJ, May 8, 2026

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How the U.S. Surveillance System Works

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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

Big Tech and Military: Microsoft – Israel Force

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Microsoft terminated in September 2025 the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, according to Guardian. Microsoft told Israeli officials that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform.

Equipped with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity and computing power, Unit 8200 had built an indiscriminate new system allowing its intelligence officers to collect, play back and analyze the content of cellular calls of an entire population.

The project was so expansive that, according to sources from Unit 8200 – which is equivalent in its remit to the US National Security Agency – a mantra emerged internally that captured its scale and ambition: “A million calls an hour.”

The enormous repository of intercepted calls – which amounted to as much as 8,000 terabytes of data – was held in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands. Within days of the Guardian publishing, Unit 8200 appears to have swiftly moved the surveillance data out of the country.

Excerpt from Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham, Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians, Guardian, Sept. 25, 2025

How to Categorize Individuals: Surveillance Pricing

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The United States Federal Trade Commission issued orders to eight companies offering surveillance pricing products and services that incorporate data about consumers’ characteristics and behavior. The orders seek information about the potential impact these practices have on privacy, competition, and consumer protection.

The orders are aimed at helping the FTC better understand the opaque market for products by third-party intermediaries that claim to use advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence and other technologies, along with personal information about consumers—such as their location, demographics, credit history, and browsing or shopping history—to categorize individuals and set a targeted price for a product or service. The study is aimed at helping the FTC better understand how surveillance pricing is affecting consumers, especially when the pricing is based on surveillance of an individual’s personal characteristics and behavior.

“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”

The FTC is using its 6(b) authority, which authorizes the Commission to conduct wide-ranging studies that do not have a specific law enforcement purpose, to obtain information from eight firms that advertise their use of AI and other technologies along with historical and real-time customer information to target prices for individual consumers. The orders were sent to: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co.

FTC Issues Orders to Eight Companies Seeking Information on Surveillance Pricing, Press Release, July 23, 2024