THE SET-UP: Trump’s Regime “quietly scaled back” government surveillance back in July. That sounds great, right? And it would be great … if it meant that the American people dropped off the radar of the NSA, the CIA, ICE and Palantir.
Nope.
What’s dropped off the Feds’ radar are six of the eight foodborne pathogens it’s been monitoring for the last 28 years! The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) has officially let campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio, and yersinia off the hook. It’s still tracking salmonella and a specific strain of E. coli, but it’s doing so with, as a new deep dive by the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School explained, a Department of Health and Human Services that’s been downsized by 20,000 employees. That triggered, among other things, the FDA’s suspension of a “proficiency testing program for milk and other dairy products.”
Public health expert Gail Hansen, DVM, MPH, told the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy that it is “especially heartbreaking to know that Listeria”—which is the third leading cause of death from foodborne illness—”is one of the pathogens that will not be tracked through FoodNet.”
Ironically, the Trump Regime’s budgetary decision to release Listeria from the FoodNet comes at the same time it is pouring money into tracking us all with Skynet. Not literally Skynet … at least, not yet. Humans still command the on/off switches that power the rapidly-growing surveillance state ICE is building under guise of mass deportation.
I say “under the guise” because it’s increasingly clear that the host of surveillance technologies being rolled-out to track so-called “illegals” also track “legals.” And now that there’s no room for doubt about who Trump regards as “the enemy within,” it would be naïve to think ICE’s apparatus cannot or will not be turned on “radical left lunatics,” anti-Christian apostates or anybody who dares to defy the Regime on social media.
The ease with which Marco Rubio turned the State Department into the thought police should give us pause … particularly when you learn that ICE just acquired a surveillance tool that, as 404 Media just reported, tracks the locations of “hundreds of millions of phones every day”:
[D]ocuments explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice.
The two products are unoriginally-named “Tangles” and “Webloc,” and they are made by Penlink. Forbes dug into Penlink a couple weeks ago and found:
ICE spent more than $5 million on these products, including $2 million for Tangles specifically. Tangles and Webloc used to be run by an Israeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs joined Penlink in July 2023.
What’s this? And Israeli company selling surveillance tools to a secret police-style goon squad?
And if you think “secret police-style goon squad” is a bit much, check out what Reason found within the last week:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is quietly building up its ability to spy on Americans’ phones. Earlier this month, the agency activated a $2 million contract with Paragon, a service that offers the ability to remotely hack into someone’s phone. Last week, ICE entered into an $11 million contract for Cellebrite devices, which allow agents to break into a locked phone in their physical possession.
“Quietly” is the operative word. We now know from 404 Media that ICE lied about using “location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones,” and we know from Reason they’d hoped to keep the Paragon and Cellebrite contracts quiet. To wit, the Cellebrite documents Reason examined were “redacted to an almost comical degree.”
Like this:
“Cellebrite’s unique capabilities are that they are the only brand product/service that ██████████.”
…and this:
“Cellebrite remains the most effective solution for ██████████.”
…and this:
“Similarly, ██████████ offers ██████████. None of these tools provide ██████████ needed to handle ██████████.”
Reason did come across a leaked training video in which “Cellebrite representatives asked police to keep the use of their devices ‘as hush hush as possible.’”
Not to be out-hushed is Palantir. In the same story, Reason reminded us that with great surveillance, comes great interoperability:
Last week, the surveillance contractor Palantir was scheduled to deliver a prototype of a “near real-time” tracking system for immigrants known as ImmigrationOS. If history is any guide, any capabilities that the government builds up in one area will soon be used in others. And with no transparency on ICE’s surveillance dragnet, there’s no way to tell what other purposes it’s being turned towards.
That’s not all from Palantir. Forbes reported just a few days ago that the inauspiciously-named purveyor of death in Gaza just scored another ICE contract … this time to implement a “controversial immigration policy known as ‘assisted voluntary return’.” Per Forbes:
The new order is part of a deal worth up to $157.5 million, which tasks the surveillance juggernaut to identify people for the agency to target in its enforcement efforts.
It’s part of the same contract under which Palantir was asked, earlier this year, to “deploy new targeting and enforcement prioritization” and “self-deportation tracking,” for the same amount, just under $30 million.
But wait, there’s more…
Another new order at just under $2 million has asked Palantir to work on ICE’s tipline and an “investigative leads suite.”
…and…
These and other federal contracts have been a major boost to Palantir’s stock price, which has doubled so far this year, bringing its market cap to over $425 billion.
We don’t know if any of these deals are related to Tom Homan’s bag of cash. But we do know from the War On Terror that once the money starts to flow, companies you’ve never heard of come out of the woodwork … like Bi2 Technologies.
It just scored a $4.6 million “non-competitive, sole-source” contract to provide ICE access to its Inmate Identification and Recognition System (IRIS) and its Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System (MORIS). The goal, according to BiometricUpdate.com, is “to fold iris recognition into everyday enforcement.”
Apparently, a “central selling point is scale”:
ICE’s narrative compares multiple reservoirs of biometric and booking data, stating that an agency whose identity ICE redacted had amassed about 2.7 million iris images as of 2023, and that “roughly 100,000 new identities [are] being added every month.”
Somewhat comically, ICE’s justification for the buy cites Trump’s “January 20 declaration of a national emergency on the southwest border,” which “ICE incorrectly identified as ‘Presidential Proclamation 108’.” That’s exactly the kind of competence I expect out of a secret police-style goon squad that’s hyperscaling under the steady hands of Kristi Noem and Tom Homan. Her hand is steady enough to shoot a puppy and his hand is steady enough to be greased with a bribe. And we all get to live with the shadowy police state that, it seems to me, could quickly and easily be redirected against the enemy within. - jp
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