Just months before the election of a president who has vowed to perform the biggest mass deportation effort in U.S. history, ICE purchased greater than $20 million price of mobile surveillance equipment.
From Thomas BrewsterForbes contributor
TImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is well prepared for President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport tens of millions of undocumented immigrants when he takes office in January. In the three months before the November election, the agency signed $20 million in contracts for brand new phone hacking, surveillance and forensics technologies to spy on and track the people he sought to drive in a foreign country can.
A Forbes A review of current ICE contracts found agreements to buy a spread of technologies that will be used together to observe phone calls, text messages and social media activity, discover people using facial recognition, remotely hack a smartphone and plunder a tool’s contents, including deleted data. These tools are made by plenty of firms, including Israel-based Paragon and Cellebrite, Canadian company Magnet Forensics, major American law enforcement contractor Pen-Link and controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI. In the last five months, these firms received their largest federal orders ever, all from ICE, contract records show.
While ICE can be prone to use these technologies as a part of its responsibilities, which include investigating cybercrimes and child exploitation, critics warn they’ll turn into a strong tool in Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants.
“These technologies have been used in democracies around the world to undermine protected civil liberties.”
Will Owen of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project described the cellphone hacking spyware spending as “a chilling look at how the Trump administration plans to carry out mass deportations through authoritarian means,” adding: “These technologies have been used in democracies around the world “To undermine the protection of civilian freedoms.”
ICE had no comment on the time of publication.
Public contract records show that Israeli-founded Cellebrite won its largest federal government contract to this point in August, with a $9.6 million take care of ICE for unspecified “forensic equipment and services.” The company has earned a fame as one of the tech-savvy cell phone exploitation providers, with its software in a position to find vulnerabilities in iOS and Android devices to interrupt into locked devices and exfiltrate the knowledge they contain. Cellebrite has worked with law enforcement agencies around the globe, including the FBI, the London Metropolitan Police Service and the Russian government, even though it selected to not Stop selling to the Kremlin in 2021. The day after Trump’s victory, Cellebrite announced record sales of $106 million. The stock hit a brand new high last week, rising 165% from the beginning of the 12 months and reaching a market cap of $4.34 billion.
David Gee, Cellebrite’s chief marketing officer, said Forbes The company’s recent contract was with Homeland Security Investigationsa law enforcement agency inside DHS ICE that can use its tools to lawfully investigate crimes that threaten national security.
While HSI has a broad scope, that’s Brennan Centera nonpartisan legal and policy institute, found last 12 months that “HSI frequently engages in routine immigration enforcement focused on the deportation of undocumented workers” and called on the White House to limit its surveillance capabilities. Gee has not made clear whether its technology has been used to observe immigrants.
Magnet Forensics, based in Waterloo, Canada, also secured its largest federal contract to this point in August when ICE spent $5 million on licenses for Graykey, an Android and iPhone hacking tool. Magnet acquired Graykey technology when it bought Grayshift, an Atlanta startup co-founded by a former Apple worker in 2016, as first revealed by Forbes. Under the last Trump administration, ICE spent just over $1 million on graykey technology. Later in August, ICE spent one other $3 million on Magnet software, which helps investigators collect and analyze data from smartphones and computers. Magnet had not responded to a request for comment on the time of publication.
In recent months, ICE has made other significant investments in surveillance technology beyond phone forensics. In September, as first reported by WiredIt spent $2 million on Paragon, a mobile spyware provider that gives a tool called Graphite for monitoring encrypted messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp (Forbes introduced the corporate in 2021). The ICE contract was placed on ice and submitted for inspection from the White House after it emerged that other Israeli-made surveillance software was utilized by firms resembling NSO and Intellexa to spy on journalists, activists and lawyers. Paragon declined to comment.
In June, ICE purchased nearly $5 million price of licenses from Pen-Link as a part of an overall deal potentially price $25 million. As Forbes As previously reported, Pen-Link has arrange telephone line tapping systems across the United States and is working on quite a few social media surveillance projects for American authorities. It also offers AI-powered analytics to search out patterns within the flood of knowledge from these sources. Pen-Link had not responded to requests for comment on the time of publication.
Facial recognition provider Clearview AI signed its largest federal contract in September, also with ICE, for $1.1 million. In 2020, Clear vision emerged as certainly one of the more controversial providers of facial recognition since it searched the Internet for images of individuals after which created them without their consent an enormous database from which law enforcement officials could try to search out matches. Clearview had not responded to a request for comment on the time of publication.
There have been multiple calls for Clearview to be banned within the US, and in Europe it has been fined and censored in several countries. Albert Fox Cahn, director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said U.S. lawmakers should go further and likewise ban mobile surveillance tools. “I just hope we don’t do too much damage before we get to that point,” he added.
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