Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division has used Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform to aggregate and analyze a sprawling list of sensitive federal databases and data sets.

Public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal the immense volume of data plugged into the military contractor’s software. The LCA uses both Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry applications to facilitate “analysis of massive-scale data to find the needle in the hay stack,” the contract paperwork says.

Documents indicate the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for these services to date.

Palantir’s LCA is ostensibly directed toward cracking down on fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. According to a 2024 agency privacy impact assessment, IRS “Special agents and investigative analysts … utilize the platform to find, analyze, and visualize connections between disparate sets of data to generate leads, identify schemes, uncover tax fraud, and conduct money laundering and forfeiture investigative activities.”

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The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating “left-leaning groups,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir, whose business model is premised on integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities,” American Oversight director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement to The Intercept. “Its platforms have been used in deeply troubling contexts, from immigration enforcement to predictive policing, with persistent concerns about overreach, bias, and weak oversight.”

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the IRS.

The contract documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that these “disparate sets of data” are vast. Palantir’s LCA allows the IRS to quickly search and visualize “connections from millions of records with thousands of links” between databases maintained by the IRS and other federal agencies. According to the contract documents, this data includes individual tax form and tax returns as well as Affordable Care Act data, bank statements, and transactions, and “all available” data compiled by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Its view apparently extends to cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple. “The application would sit on top of a singular repository of identified wallets from seized servers utilizing dark web data obtained from exchangers such as Coinbase,” the documents note.

The program places an emphasis on mapping social relationships between the targets of an investigation. That includes analyzing a “network of people and the relationships and communications between them,” such as “calls, texts, [and] emails events.” The use of “IP address analysis” within LCA allows the IRS to “Identify suspects more easily” and “Establish (new) relationships among actors.”

These investigative functions are continuously updated, the materials say, through ongoing close work between Palantir engineers and IRS personnel.

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The intermingling of sensitive data on millions of Americans comes at a time of increased global skepticism and opposition toward Palantir, which, despite its military-intelligence origins, has a thriving business with civilian agencies like the IRS. The use of Palantir software at the U.K.’s National Health Service, for example, has created an ongoing political controversy across Britain, while a similar contract with the New York City public hospital network was recently canceled following public protest.

The contract is also active at a time when IRS Criminal Investigations has been coopted to aid in the broader Trump administration’s aggressive agenda. In July, ProPublica reported that the agency was working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide “on demand” data to accelerate deportations. Last year, the New York Times reported that Palantir, founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, was central to an administration effort to increase data-sharing across federal agencies.

The company’s right-wing politics and eagerness to facilitate U.S. and Israeli military aggression abroad, NSA global surveillance, and ICE deportations has also made many weary of its access to incredibly sensitive personal data. A recent post on the company’s Palantir’s X account summarizing a book by CEO Alex Karp triggered an immediate backlash from those unnerved by the manifesto’s fascistic bent. The bullet points extolled the virtue of arms manufacturing, argued the Axis powers were unfairly punished after World War II, called for a reinstatement of the draft, condemned cultural pluralism, and claimed that wealthy elites are unfairly persecuted.

“When the government can map relationships, track behavior, and generate investigative leads across data sets at this scale, the question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against,” Chukwu said. “Entrusting that infrastructure to a company known for opaque, security-state deployments only heightens those risks.”

The post Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct “Massive-Scale” Data Mining appeared first on The Intercept.

Last year, the LAPD launched its “Drone as First Responder” program with a clearly articulated goal: to protect and even save lives. The pilot program authorized the rapid deployment of drones to the scenes of certain emergency calls before human officers even arrive. After receiving a 911 call, authorities can dispatch a drone to get a better picture of what’s happening from the sky, potentially reducing the number of officers dispatched. This means police resources could, theoretically, be more efficiently deployed to other emergencies around the city.

“This innovative program not only aims to enhance transparency in Department operations but also prioritizes the protection of individual privacy,” the LAPD explained in a webpage about the program. “By deploying drones as an invaluable resource for patrol officers, the DFR Pilot Program provides a cutting-edge tool that can respond swiftly to emergencies, ensuring a safer environment for all.”

The LAPD turned to Skydio, a California-based drone startup that previously marketed its aircraft to consumers but has pivoted to supplying militarized, weapons-compatible hardware for the U.S. Army, Israeli Defense Forces, and other governments.

The LAPD insists the DFR program presents no threat to personal privacy or civil liberties. “Unless you are in the commission of a crime or under criminal investigation for the commission of a crime,” assures the website, “the officers utilizing the drone are not interested in recording you.”

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But according to flight data shared publicly by the LAPD and Skydio, the city has used DFR not only to respond to emergencies, but also to monitor multiple protests across Los Angeles. Software engineer and flight data researcher John Wiseman has tracked DFR aircraft to at least two protests in Los Angeles this year, he told The Intercept, raising questions as to whether the city is operating an aerial surveillance program against nonviolent, constitutionally protected activity.

Flight records show DFR drones were launched at least 31 times to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” protest in downtown Los Angeles, which saw thousands peacefully march against the administration’s deportations raids and street violence in Minneapolis. The Los Angeles Times said the “mostly peaceful protest took a turn as day turned to night in downtown Los Angeles and the crowd refused to disperse,” whereupon police began firing tear gas at remaining demonstrators.

At the March 28 “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration, city data shows the LAPD again launched drones 32 times over the area where the demonstration took place. A heat map visualization created by Wiseman based on the city data shows the drones lingered for extended periods over the Metropolitan Detention Center and the intersection of North Central Avenue and East Temple Street in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.

Following the protest, the city’s local ABC News affiliate reported the event “drew tens of thousands who listened to speakers before marching peacefully through downtown streets.” The LAPD later arrested 75 individuals, 74 of whom were taken in simply for not dispersing when ordered by police.

The DFR flight data shows the drones began orbiting the protest at 2 p.m., hours before the order to disperse was issued at 5:30 p.m., and continued flying until 9 p.m. that evening. Nine drone flights began before the dispersal order.

In response to questions about the protest surveillance, LAPD Lt. Matthew Jacobs told The Intercept, “We do not document or record unless there is a crime occurring.”

“When it comes to a protest or demonstration, we’re responding [with drones] at the request of the Incident Commander,” Jacobs said. “We’re looking for specific people, we’re not taping First Amendment activity.”

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Jacobs added that “99 percent of the time” drones are sent to a protest “because the commander reports a crime in progress,” and claimed a “wide variety of crimes” are committed at protests, from vandalism to rocks thrown at officers. Jacobs added at times the department simply “wants to see how big a crowd is.”

When asked why drones were surveilling the No Kings protest hours before the dispersal order, Jacobs said that the LAPD “cannot provide deeper insight into specifics of a single flight.”

When not recording, Jacobs said DFR cameras are monitored by both their pilots and LAPD personnel on the ground, who have access to the live feeds. Any recorded footage is stored on an indefinite basis.

The police department did not answer a detailed list of follow-up questions, including how much protest-related data it has captured via drone surveillance to date or who monitors drone feeds over protests.

The LAPD’s fleet of Skydio X10 drones monitor the ground using with a sophisticated suite of sensors the company says are capable of detecting the presence of person from a distance of more than 8,000 feet and identifying an individual more than 2,500 feet away. The company also touts the drone’s ability to read license plates from a distance of 800 feet. Last year, Skydio CEO Adam Bry demonstrated how two police officers using the company’s DFR Command software could operate eight drones at once between them, tracking license plates and automatically following people of interest.

Update: April 20, 2026, 4:08 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include new comment from the Los Angeles Police Department.

The post LAPD Deployed Drones to Spy on No Kings Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

These overlooked stories share the same ideological slant and editorial voice: that of the White House. Al-Fassel’s YouTube account, for instance, has racked up millions of views on Arabic-language videos praising the Trump administration’s Gaza policy and exhorting Hamas to cease “taking orders from the Iranian regime” and release Israeli prisoners. On Pishtaz News, a poll on the homepage recently asked: “[H]ow would you describe your belief about the Supreme Leader’s current health status and whereabouts?” Possible answers range from “In good health but hiding” to “Disfigured” or “Dead.” The excellence of Saudi and Emirati leadership, both close military partners of the U.S., is a recurring theme.

There’s a reason this coverage echoes American foreign policy talking points. Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News are, in fact, part of network of websites and social media accounts purporting to be legitimate Middle Eastern news outlets that are in fact propaganda mills funded by the United States government, The Intercept has found.

Disclosed only at the bottom of both sites behind an “About” link that is easily missed by casual readers, the outlets note that they are “a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The government affiliation remains undisclosed on social media platforms including Instagram, despite a platform policy requiring the labeling of state-backed media outlet to prevent the unwitting consumption of government propaganda.

The sites’ recent fixation on crushing Iran is unlikely to be a coincidence: Both publications share numerous connections with a portfolio of fake newsrooms that originated as a military psychological operations campaign against foreign internet users.

Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News did not respond to requests for comment, nor did CENTCOM or the Department of Defense.

In 2008, U.S. Special Operations Command put out a call for contractors to help operate what it called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, a project that would provide “rapid, on-order global dissemination of web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” In other words, state propaganda pushed by Pentagon.

Masquerading as independent online newsrooms, the TRWI sites hired “indigenous content stringers” to produce articles “which Combatant Commands (COCOMs) can use as necessary in support of the Global War on Terror.” The contract, awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology, spawned 10 websites that funneled U.S. foreign policy talking points to audiences across the Middle East and South Asia, running everything from banal essays about inter-faith coexistence to, as reported by Foreign Policy in 2011, articles intended to “whitewash the image of Central Asian dictatorships.” By 2014, the sites were deemed a failure by Congress and de-funded.

Eight years later, a team of researchers published an unusual report. Following the 2016 election, the bulk of the Western media’s interest in online propagandizing had focused on influence campaigns attributed to Russia, China, and other American geopolitical rivals. But the 2022 report from the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika, a commercial internet analysis firm and Pentagon information warfare contractor, uncovered a network of phony “pro-Western” Twitter and Facebook accounts that pushed articles from pseudo-news websites. The report stopped short of formally attributing the campaign to the U.S., but noted that both Meta and Twitter had done so. The researchers concluded that the accounts in question attempted the coordinated spread of articles from a network of sham news websites established by U.S. Special Operations Command.

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The report found that just a few years after TRWI’s ostensible death, many of the sites had simply rebranded, now carrying hard-to-find disclosures mentioning they were run by U.S. Central Command. Following Stanford and Graphika’s findings, some of the sites shut down; others continued. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post found that the embarrassing revelations spurred the Pentagon to conduct “a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare.”

A review of the Internet Archive shows that in the aftermath of the Stanford report, TRWI sites that remained in operation changed their disclosure language. Rather than citing CENTCOM sponsorship, these sites shifted to state that they are “publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The disclosure language used by the remaining network of CENTCOM propaganda sites is a word-for-word copy of the phrasing The Intercept found tucked away on the About pages of Pishtaz News and Al-Fassel.

That’s not the only evidence suggesting a link to this network of military propaganda sites.

Since they began publishing in 2023, Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News have regularly quoted or summarized CENTCOM press releases touting regional operations and battlefield successes, as did the outlets mentioned in the Stanford/Graphika report. The reliance on combatant command press releases in particular is an editorial strategy that dates back to the original SOCOM-run TRWI network.

On X, Pishtaz News follows only three other users; two are the official CENTCOM accounts for Farsi and Arabic audiences. The Pishtaz News Instagram account, which carries no disclosure of the account’s governmental nature, follows only one other user: “US CENTCOM FARSI.”

Intentionally or otherwise, Al-Fassel’s posts to X are often geotagged as having been sent from Lutz, Florida, a stone’s throw from the headquarters of CENTCOM and SOCOM in Tampa, as well as myriad military contractors that service both.

Both sites also share common design elements with the TRWI-associated publications that suggest they were created or operated by the same contractor: All posts conclude with a poll asking “Do you like this article?” using the same thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons. URLs are structured identically for Al-Fassel, Pishtaz News, and Salaam Times — an Afghanistan-focused site launched under the TRWI that continues today under a different name — suggesting they were coded using the same tools. The three sites use an identical 404 error graphic to alert users when they’ve clicked on a broken link, as well.

The web design of Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News — including page layout, URL structure, 404 error graphic, and much of the legal verbiage in the About sections — closely mirrors that of CENTCOMcitadel.com, a publication with similar content that carries an overt disclosure of Pentagon sponsorship at the bottom of its homepage.

“These sites are similar in style to the overt messaging efforts we saw from the Department of Defense previously,” Renée DiResta, a former Stanford researcher and co-author of the 2022 report, told The Intercept. “We previously saw this pattern of clearer U.S. affiliation language in the About page of the domain, then minimal to no acknowledgement on the social media profiles.”

There are other subtle nods to the sites’ true purpose: URLs for the English language versions of each site are denoted “en_GB,” for Great Britain. In a comprehensive 2015 analysis of the TRWI network, University of Bath doctoral student Roy Revie observed that the network of American military propaganda sites explicitly marked their English versions as British because “SOCOM seeks to avoid any suggestion its sites are aimed at US audiences.”

In the parlance of information warfare, these propaganda shops are considered “overt” rather than “covert,” because their state ownership is technically disclosed. But in his 2015 paper, Revie argued that these psyop sites still engage in deception. They use online journalism as a form of camouflage, he wrote, because most readers won’t seek out a publication’s About page to learn about its funding. The design of these sites “allows the DOD to credibly claim full transparency and maintain legitimacy, putting the onus onto the user to inform themselves about the source,” Revie wrote.

The output of both sites consistently lionizes the U.S. and Israel, along with America’s Gulf allies. They regularly demean the Iranian state, presenting a wholly lopsided and misleading account in a time of war. “The US says it does not seek open conflict with Tehran,” reads a March 2 article in Al-Fassel. Both sites have repeatedly cited reporting by Iran International — a Saudi-funded, pro-Israel, Iranian monarchist publication with a long record of journalistic misrepresentation. A March 31 Pishtaz News article, for instance, based on an entirely anonymously sourced Iran International post, alleged that Iranian security forces gang-raped nurses in Tehran.

Recent coverage depicts Iran as up against the ropes. A March 22 article in Pishtaz News exclaimed, “The Islamic Republic’s regular army, known as the Artesh, is increasingly described by informed observers as a force under severe strain and institutional neglect.” Another anonymously authored piece from March 25, headlined “Artesh would be better off without its main rival,” seems intended to stoke tensions between Iran’s regular army and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Without the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), resources could flow directly to the regular army, known as the Artesh, enabling meaningful modernization,” the story claimed, a talking point ripped straight from the mouths of right-wing Iran hawks in the U.S. In a March 18 Fox News segment, for example, retired Gen. Jack Keane suggested that an Artesh–IRGC rivalry could be exploited to accomplish regime change.

It’s unclear who exactly writes what appears on these sites. Most articles run without any byline, while other stories are published under names that are difficult to find any mention of anywhere else on the internet. Some of the personnel may not be real at all. A January Al-Fassel YouTube overview of recent regional headlines was narrated by an Arabic-speaking man in a sharp blue blazer. Experts told The Intercept the newscaster was likely a product of generative AI and not genuine footage. “The strongest indicator is an almost complete absence of eye blinks,” Georgetown University professor and deepfake researcher Sejin Paik told The Intercept. Zuzanna Wojciak, a synthetic media researcher with the human rights organization Witness, reached the same conclusion, citing strange anomalies with his skin, hands, and teeth.

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Some articles deeply misstate or misrepresent the facts. An April 15 Al-Fassel article about Iran’s “war crime threats” against the American University of Beirut omitted the fact that these threats came in response to repeated U.S.–Israel airstrikes against Iranian schools. The day after an Al-Fassel article described the Houthis as “crippled” and “largely disintegrated,” capable of offering only “verbal support” for Iran, the Yemeni militant group launched cruise missiles at Israel.

The outlets also illustrate the extent of deceptive messaging radiating from the Pentagon and White House: A March 5 post to the Pishtaz News Instagram account boasted, “The Iranian regime’s ability to strike US forces and regional partners is rapidly eroding, while US combat power continues to grow.” Four weeks later, Iran was continuing to lob missiles at U.S. bases as well as its regional partners, and succeeded in downing an American F-15 and A-10 Warthog. An April 4 Al-Fassel Instagram post claimed, citing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that “Iran is not satisfied with a peaceful nuclear program, but seeking to enhance its military capabilities,” even though a 2025 assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded the opposite.

Other articles dispense with masquerading as journalism, reading more as warnings straight from Washington: “United States is fully prepared to protect its forces in Middle East,” read a June 2025 headline on Pishtaz News. “With advanced technological capabilities and highly-trained personnel, the United States maintains one of the world’s most capable military forces, continuously adapting to evolving security challenges to maintain order and stability.” A March 27 Pishtaz News tweet was more straightforward. “You will be systematically annihilated,” it threatens in Farsi. “Your commanders are hiding in bunkers. They have sent their families and wealth abroad—why are you still fighting for them?”

Some articles purport to include comments from genuine expert sources. In at least one case, this happened without the knowledge of the source. A July 2025 article in Al-Fassel predicted that a future closure of the Strait of Hormuz “would harm China and Russia more than other nations.” The article quoted Umud Shokri, an energy analyst affiliated with George Mason University, the State Department, and the Middle East Institute. “I would like to clarify that I was not aware of any affiliation between alfasselnews.com and the U.S. government,” Shokri told The Intercept. “I also did not have any direct interview with the platform, nor was I contacted by them directly. To the best of my knowledge, any quotation attributed to me appears to have been drawn from prior public commentary or other media appearances.”

Prior to the war on Iran, a top priority on both sites was marketing the U.S.–Israeli plans for the future of Gaza. The message is essentially a distillation of the U.S.–Israel–Gulf State consensus: That all Palestinian suffering is brought on by Hamas rather than the past three years of Israeli bombardment, and that the Trump-sponsored “Board of Peace” augurs an unprecedented era of prosperity for Palestinians.

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“The incoming Board of Peace,” a December 2025 Al-Fassel piece claimed, “is expected to foster conditions for democratic representation and meaningful civic participation.” A December 12 Al-Fassel YouTube video similarly blamed Hamas and Iran, rather than Israel, for the blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, followed by an AI-generated image of a science fiction city overlaid with Arabic captions promising billions in foreign investment and economic revitalization for Gaza. The video currently has nearly 1.7 million views.

Other items around Gaza further invert reality. Since October 2025, Gaza has been bifurcated by the so-called “Yellow Line,” an arbitrary boundary behind which Israeli forces nominally withdrew last year. Palestinians on the Israeli side of the line face harsh occupying military governance, while those on the other side risk being killed.

Despite claims by Al-Fassel’s video team that Trump’s Gaza policy will herald the ability for countless Palestinians to return home, Israeli forces routinely fire at civilians approaching this buffer zone.

“Incidents of gunfire, shelling, and limited incursions have continued near the ‘Yellow Line,’ the separation zone near the border with Israel, keeping any return highly dangerous,” according to a United Nations video report. “With the amount of available space shrinking, thousands of families have been forced to return to the edges of their destroyed neighborhoods near the ‘Yellow Line,’ despite what residents say is the continued risk of injury or death from intermittent fire.”

Not so, says Al-Fassel: “The Yellow Line is more than a boundary; it is a lifeline designed to keep Gaza’s families safe and informed during the ceasefire,” claimed a November article. “The Yellow Line is not a symbol of division — it is a lifeline.”

Following the 2016 election and the panic surrounding Russian covert propaganda efforts, major American social media platforms began adding labels to the accounts of government-controlled media properties. Videos from Al Jazeera English’s YouTube account, for instance, come with a disclaimer that “Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government.” Although X abandoned this policy in 2023, it is still nominally on the books for both Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube.

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There is no disclosure, however, in the Instagram posts or accounts of Al-Fassel or Pishtaz News. YouTube videos from both accounts do not include a disclaimer about U.S. funding; however, a brief disclosure can be found on their main account pages, tucked into an About section that must be expanded to be read.

Neither site appears to have a particularly large audience on social media. Both have paltry followings on X — about 2,400 for Al-Fassel, and only 132 following Pishtaz News — with many appearing to be spam-based accounts with names followed by a long string of numbers that engage in posting behavior common to spam networks. Al-Fassel has found modest engagement on Instagram, where it has over 7,700 followers. Though Pishtaz News has only 475 followers on Instagram, its posts sometimes break through; a March 18 post of CENTCOM footage from the deck of an aircraft carrier, for example, racked up more than 1,100 likes.

At times, the content published by the propaganda sites may have reached American audiences. A March 27 Al-Fassel story alleging the total collapse of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” was shared that same day to FreeRepublic, the conservative American message board, by user MeanWestTexan. Federal law forbids Pentagon propaganda aimed at Americans, though a similar prohibition aimed at the State Department was overturned in 2013.

Sometimes their stories reach other Western readers. An Al-Fassel article on the Houthis made its way into the citations of a 2024 article in the academic journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy by University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau. (Juneau did not respond to a request for comment.) A submission to the U.N.’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances from Justice for All International, a Swiss-based nonprofit, similarly cited an Al-Fassel post on the IRGC, while an annual report by the state-operated Swedish Defence Research Agency relied in part on an Al-Fassel article on ISIS. The Intercept reviewed multiple entries on Grokipedia, X’s Wikipedia clone, citing Al-Fassel articles as well.

Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber policy adviser, believes CENTCOM is most likely behind the sites and considers their overall reach lackluster. When it comes to online propaganda, he said, the U.S. “could learn some lessons from Iran.” Iranian propaganda efforts — mostly quickly produced AI slop — have captured the attention of the internet in a way that the U.S. ersatz newsrooms have not.

But the sites’ limited reach is unlikely to bring them to a halt anytime soon. Even as the Trump administration has gutted Voice of America and other long-standing tools of U.S. soft power, these sites have continued publishing. If their similarities to the long-running American military psyops are more than coincidental, that says more about a culture of inertia at the Pentagon than its success in winning hearts and minds. Brooking told The Intercept that because operating blogs amounts to a “rounding error” within the broader defense budget, such projects can continue with little scrutiny.

A seldom-read network of propaganda sites might seem to have little purpose. But it’s the kind of thing authorities can gesture toward, Brooking said, when pressed about their efforts to combat Iran in the “information space.” “Successive SOCOM or CENTCOM or other senior leaders could point to the fact that they’re maintaining this network of websites,” he said.

The post These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations appeared first on The Intercept.

This spring, Meta quietly revised its Community Standards policy, an internal company document dictating what its billions of global users can and cannot say online. The latest tweaks can be found in a chapter on “Violence and Incitement,” where a subsection titled “Other Violence” spells out, among other rules, the company’s bans on ads for assassins. It’s in this subsection where Meta last month published a revision to include new limitations for users who mention antifascism.

Policy documents reviewed by The Intercept show the company now treats any “Content that includes the word ‘antifa’ as a potential rules violation if that word appears along with what Meta deems a “content-level threat signal” — meaning a statement that the company believes implies violence.

In some cases, the content that Meta considers a threat signal is commonsensical. If, for instance, a user mentions bringing a weapon to an event, the company flags it as a threat signal. But in other cases, Meta’s process for identifying threat signals is more vague. Under the new rules, Meta might trigger a threat signal when a user posts a “visual depiction of a weapon,” a “reference to arson, theft, or vandalism,” or “military language,” if accompanied by the word “antifa.”

If “antifa” is mentioned in the context of “references to historical or recent incidents of violence” — a category so sprawling that it includes “historic wars” and “battles” —  that post will also be penalized. Should Meta apply this rule as written, the company could, for instance, restrict posts comparing the antifascist nature of World War II to the contemporary antifa movement.

Potential penalties for violating Community Standards range from a full account ban to comments being hidden or suppressed.

The policy change follows years of Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot of political convenience toward President Donald Trump and his base. Following Trump’s second electoral victory, Meta quickly changed its speech rules to allow for anti-transgender slurs and dehumanization of immigrants, The Intercept previously reported, aligning the company with longtime MAGA culture war grievances.

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Asked about the new restrictions on the word “antifa,” Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin pointed to a March transparency report that noted the company would “remove QAnon and Antifa content when combined with content-level threat signals.” The report does not explain what those signals are. Meta did not respond when asked if the company had discussed its antifa speech rules with the Trump administration.

Meta largely outsources the enforcement of its Community Standards rules to low-paid contractors whose interpretation and application of the policies can vary. The company’s automated, algorithmic content moderation systems are also famously glitchy. This combination can result in erratic censorship, particularly when political ideology is classified as violent or terroristic.

The new rules around saying “antifa” on Facebook and Instagram comes amid efforts by the White House to crack down on left-wing political organizing under the guise of national security. Though antifa is a contraction of the word antifascism and not an actual group, Trump last September signed an executive order designating the leaderless decentralized movement as a domestic terrorist organization. A subsequent executive memorandum, NSPM-7, again singled out “antifa” ideology as a cause of “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.”

Prior reporting by The Intercept has shown Meta historically hews closely to federal terrorism labels. Meta in 2020 announced it would tackle the leftist bogeyman under its “Movements and Organizations Tied to Violence” policy alongside QAnon, the right-wing mass delusion that helped foment the January 6 effort to overturn the results of the presidential election by force. Though self-identified antifa adherents have taken part in acts of property damage during protests, analyses repeatedly show that left-wing violence in the United States is a relatively small and rare threat compared to right-wing extremist groups and militias.

The post Facebook and Instagram Tighten Censorship Rules for Saying “Antifa” appeared first on The Intercept.

CBP will spend up to $50 million on what it refers to as “Less Lethal Specialty Munitions,” a euphemism for weapons intended to merely hurt or disable a target rather than killing them. The agency is looking for a vendor who can supply vast quantities of 123 different types of munitions across 10 different categories, the contracting document says.

“The sheer quantity and the myriad different weapons is the most remarkable thing to me,” Rohini Haar, an emergency physician and researcher of less lethal ordnance told The Intercept. “When there’s so many different kinds, it makes you question, tactically, what’s the goal there?”

Federal agents’ indiscriminate use of “less-lethal” chemical weapons against the nonviolent demonstrators became a hallmark of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Contract documents show the Department of Homeland Security will continue to stockpile a massive arsenal of tear gases and projectile weapons. (Neither CBP nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Haar questioned whether the Department of Homeland Security will be able to suitably train federal agents to use such a wide variety of weapons.

“Each of them has a different sort of technical spec or specifications,” she explained. “Some of them are handheld grenades that you have to know to throw, but not hit people’s heads. Some of them are fired from a weapon, like a launcher, and so you have to be standing farther away than you would be with a grenade.”

Two Tear Gases

The shopping list includes a litany of different ways to hit people and objects with two common types of tear gas: chlorobenzalmalononitrile, or CS, a chemical weapon previously used by the U.S. in Vietnam but now banned for military use, and oleoresin capsicum, or OC, derived from chili peppers.

CBP agents already regularly use CS and OC-based weapons in the field, including against protesters. The procurement document shows that armed federal officers will continue to wield the threat of chemical agents against the public despite ample documentation of misuse.

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Some of CBP’s desired weapons are designed to spread these chemical weapons indiscriminately. Included on the wish list are quart containers of liquid CS and OC meant to be spread through thermal “foggers,” dispersal devices meant to create mists with microscopic droplets of liquid. Defense Technology, a longtime chemical weapons vendor for CBP and U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, says its Golden Eagle Pepper Fogger Generator can output 100,000 cubic feet of tear gas in 26 seconds.

Both chemicals are potent chemicals that can cause health effects far beyond debilitating pain.

“Greater exposure to chemical agents,” a 2023 study by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health found, “was significantly associated with higher odds of an adverse reproductive health outcomes.”

The outcomes included “uterine cramping, early menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness and delayed menstrual bleeding.”

The procurement list includes smoke grenades in four different colors and 12 different varieties of tear-gas grenades.

The weapons will be ordered in enormous volumes. CBP projects purchasing over 242,000 munitions from the “Hand Delivered Pyrotechnic Canisters” category and over 100,000 rounds of “impact munitions” fired from grenade launcher-style tubes.

The latter category includes foam-tipped “sponge cartridge” ammunition designed to either release a tear gas-style chemical upon hitting someone or merely harm them through sheer force of impact.

Maimed, Deafened, Blinded

Fired at close enough range, so-called less lethal rounds can easily kill or maim their target.

Anti-ICE demonstrator Kaden Rummler lost sight in his left eye after he was shot in the face by a federal officer in January. After the Los Angeles Police Department fired one such round directly into the face of another protester last summer, he was injured so seriously that he required surgery and had his jaw wired shut for six weeks.

“Distraction devices,” which emit loud sounds, bright lights, or other effects to stun targets, were also on CBP’s wish list, with plans to purchase 13,000 of them. The procurement document required the weapons be capable of emitting a sound of 175 decibels, louder than a gunshot or jet engine. The National Hearing Conservation Association warns of sound of 140 decibels can case permanent damage and “death of hearing tissue” begins at 180 decibels.

“In addition to injuries caused directly by the primary blast wave, such as ear-drum rupture or lung injury, secondary and tertiary injuries can also occur as a result of these explosive devices,” says a 2023 publication by Physicians for Human Rights that was co-authored by Haar.

CBP’s inclusion of rubber-ball grenades and scattershot projectiles alarmed Scott Reynhout, a researcher who also co-authored the PHR paper. When such grenades are thrown or launched at people, they release a burst of small rubber fragments akin to shrapnel in every direction and can be configured to simultaneously release tear gas.

“The procurement of the latter weapons is worrying as these have not seen widespread use yet by CBP/ICE in protests,” said Reynhout, referring to the scattershot projectiles, which he said were akin to “rubber buckshot.”

Such weapons were used by Chilean security forces against protesters six years ago, he said, resulting in more than 400 cases of partial or full-blindness, and are also employed extensively by Iranian police and paramilitaries in their crackdowns on demonstrations.

Weapons designed to pierce building materials were also included in the wish list.

CBP plans to purchase over 12,000 “ferret rounds,” projectiles filled with powdered or liquified chemicals that punch through barriers and spread tear gas on the other side.

Haar said, “If it can go through glass, particle board, and walls, it can go through a body.”

The post DHS Launches Massive “Less Lethal” Chemical Weapons Buying Spree appeared first on The Intercept.

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The Intercept reported in February that the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which operates a network of public health care facilities across the city, had paid Palantir almost $4 million since 2023 for data analysis services. NYCHH says it used Palantir’s software to boost its efficiency in billing Medicaid and other public benefits, which included the automated scanning of patient health notes.

The contract prompted protests from activists and local organizers who objected to the hospital system’s use of software from a company whose technology has facilitated lethal airstrike targeting, wide-reaching surveillance of American citizens, and deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

At a March 16 meeting of the New York City Council, NYC Health + Hospitals CEO Mitchell Katz disclosed that Palantir’s contract will not be renewed come October. Katz defended the health care network’s collaboration with Palantir on the grounds that there was an “absolute firewall” between patient data and the company’s government customers, such as ICE, that would prevent information sharing. “We haven’t had any problems,” Katz said, “And we’re going to end the contract anyway because we always intended it to be a short-term solution.”

According to Katz, data analysis previously conducted with Palantir’s help will be brought in-house following the contract’s expiration.

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“Palantir makes money by enabling mass violence in the U.S. and around the world. They should have no place in our hospitals, our pension funds, or our government,” said Kenny Morris, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, which shared the contract documents with The Intercept.

“Our campaign against Palantir doesn’t stop in NYC,” Morris said. “We will continue to isolate this company and limit its destructive influence on our lives. In this city and around the world, communities are organizing to push more and more corporate clients, institutions, and politicians to cut ties with Palantir.”

The post Palantir Will No Longer Profit Off of New Yorkers’ Health Data appeared first on The Intercept.

In an era when companies known for e-commerce, social networks, and search engines have also become close collaborators with militaries, is bombing their servers fair game?

Three days after the U.S. and Israel began their joint bombardment, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched kamikaze drone strikes against Amazon-owned data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain that provide an array of cloud computing services to customers throughout the Middle East. The impacts and subsequent fires “caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” according to Amazon, resulting in service outages across the region.

The motive behind the attack, according to Iranian state television, was not to block people from ordering groceries or posting to social media, but rather to highlight “the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.” Though only Amazon’s centers are known to have come under fire, a March 11 tweet from the quasi-official Tasnim News Agency listed dozens of regional facilities, including data centers owned by Microsoft, Google and others, deemed “Enemy Technology Infrastructure” suitable for targeting.

It’s unclear if the Amazon data centers struck by Iranian drone strikes are used for military purposes or civilian purposes, or both. And it’s unknown if the attacks in any way hindered the militaries of the U.S., Israel, or their allies in the Gulf from using AI or other cloud-based services in their war efforts. But with Amazon, Google, and even Facebook parent company Meta are all eager partners of the Pentagon that augment the destructive power of the United States in Iran and elsewhere, server farms may now have the same status as factories building bombs and warplanes.

Scholars of international law and the laws of armed conflict say that when a military runs on the cloud, the cloud becomes a legal military target. But the cloud is an abstraction, not a physical site — a global network of millions of chips in servers spread across hundreds of massive buildings across the planet, servicing both civilian apps and state tools used to surveil and kill. Separating the former from the latter is an extremely difficult task.

“The legality turns on whether the specific facility, at the specific moment, is genuinely serving the military operations of a party to the conflict in a way that offers a concrete and definite advantage to the attacker,” explained León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a lawyer with the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague.

Sometimes the split between military and civilian use is straightforward. Microsoft, for example, helps run the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, which the Pentagon says provides it with “greater lethality.” This work involves the processing of classified data, which the government does not want commingling with civilian tech. Cloud computing services are generally offered via geographically distinct “regions,” each made up of many physical data centers. Customers typically select the region that is closest to them to minimize lag time. Microsoft’s US DoD Central and US DoD East regions are “reserved for exclusive [Department of Defense] use,” according to the company, and are serviced by data centers in Des Moines, Iowa, and Northern Virginia, respectively.

Amazon offers similar cloud regions exclusive for Pentagon use, though the location of these data centers is not public. Oracle, another JWCC provider, operates Pentagon-specific facilities in Chicago, Phoenix, and Virginia. Companies are understandably tight-lipped about where exactly on the map these facilities stand, in no small part because Iran, or any country at war with the U.S., would have reason to target them.

“A data center that is used solely or primarily for military applications is targetable,” said Ioannis Kalpouzos, an international law scholar and visiting professor at Harvard Law, “and a center that supports the Pentagon’s JWCC falls in that category.”

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The march of data center construction has become a point of contention across the United States and around the world, with communities frequently — and sometimes successfully — rallying to block what they view as enormous resource-draining eyesores. But for those living in the widening shadow of data centers, planned or built, their status as military targets may be unsettling beyond concerns over water and energy consumption.

And as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aggressively shoehorns AI tools into the military wherever possible, the rapid expansion of data centers means the potential proliferation of legitimate military targets across the United States.

With comparisons between the destructive power of AI-augmented warfare and nuclear weaponry becoming more common, the ever-expanding network of American data centers may recreate Cold War anxieties around intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, silo placement. The country’s nuclear launch capabilities were famously clustered in the relatively sparsely populated Upper Midwest, forming a so-called “nuclear sponge” that would draw Soviet nukes away from population centers and toward rural areas and farmland.

But the legal calculus around most data centers will be less clear. Google, for example, says the Pentagon uses both its general purpose public cloud and smaller specialized air-gapped networks that don’t touch the public internet, depending on the sensitivity of the data involved. Even cloud work involving Top Secret military data “can operate within Google’s trusted, secure, and managed data centers.” The company also sells modular mini-data centers for use closer to battlefields or bases.

These arrangements, shrouded in both military and trade secrecy, make it hard to assess whether a server is hosting a student’s homework or Air Force R&D, blurring the legality of attacking data centers that may host both. Google may have little control over how governments use its cloud tools; The Intercept has previously reported that Google executives worried internally they wouldn’t be able to tell how the Israeli military was deploying its cloud services.

“The practical challenge is that cloud infrastructure is often technically opaque, even to providers themselves,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz said. “The services a given data center supports may not be readily ascertainable from the outside or even inside, which complicates the attacker’s legal obligations considerably.”

Amazon and Google’s Project Nimbus similarly provides cloud computing services across the Israeli government, including both civilian agencies and the Ministry of Defense, along with state-owned weapons companies.

“The picture becomes more legally complex when a data center functions as a so-called ‘dual-use’ object,” simultaneously hosting military data or capabilities alongside civilian services,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz told The Intercept. “Once a facility is found to make an effective contribution to military action, the entire physical object can, under the dominant legal view, qualify as a military objective.”

The embrace of commercial cloud computing by the U.S. and others has muddled an already murky legal picture, Castellanos-Jankiewicz explained. “A military’s decision to store classified data or run AI-enabled military systems on commercial cloud infrastructure shared with civilian services could itself raise legal concerns — particularly if the commingling of military and civilian uses makes a strike more likely or increases the foreseeable harm to civilians when one occurs.”

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Determining whether a given data center can be legally attacked under international humanitarian law — itself comprised of various treaties that not every country adheres to — relies on a complex series of balancing tests that rarely produce concrete answers. To begin with, every object and person is generally presumed civilian and exempt from attack under this framework. Before launching a strike, a country is supposed to have a verifiable reason to believe a data center contributes to the enemy war effort, and reason to believe an attack will appreciably harm that effort. What “effectively contributes to military action” will, of course, be a source of disagreement.

Anthropic’s Claude large language model was reportedly used to accelerate American airstrikes against Iran; Claude, in turn, was built in part using 500,000 chips housed in an $11 billion Amazon data center in Indiana. If Claude is now arguably a weapon, is this Indiana site the data equivalent of a bomb factory? Kalpouzos, the Harvard Law visiting professor, told The Intercept it depends on the facts at the moment the bomb hits, not past usage. “If the facility is currently used in the training of the LLM that is used in the conduct of military operations — for example, by fine-tuning object classification or user-interaction features — then this could render it targetable,” he said.

In a recent article for Just Security, Klaudia Klonowska and Michael Schmitt said that the law calls for proportionality and restraint even against military targets. An attack against a data center that provided both military and civilian computing would need to be precise enough to destroy the former while minimizing harm to the latter, they argued. But international law may call for a degree of carefulness that militaries have little interest in. “If it were possible to attack only the area of the data center where servers hosting military data are located without destroying the entire center, the attacker would need to do so,” they wrote.

These requirements can be hard to observe in reality. The U.S. and Israel both tout the extreme precision of airstrikes that regularly slaughter civilians. And neither country, nor Iran, is a signatory to some of the relevant legal frameworks that make up the so-called “laws of armed conflict” in the first place.

Indiscriminate warfare practice by U.S. and Israel has also, ironically, been instrumental in reshaping how these laws are interpreted and effectively loosened. Throughout the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israel’s military and the Pentagon both made clear it’s acceptable to destroy an apartment block or hospital if one first claims there is a genuine military target inside.

The second Trump administration in particular has been keen to more tightly integrate Silicon Valley into the global American killing apparatus, a plan to which the industry has shown itself to be largely amenable. Even after being thoroughly maligned by the administration following the collapse of its Pentagon deal over purported disagreements around safety guardrails, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a public statement making clear he still wanted in on military spending: “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences. We both are committed to advancing US national security and defending the American people, and agree on the urgency of applying AI across the government.” That attitude, now commonplace across the tech sector, will see the further commingling of consumer tech and warfare both in the abstract and under sprawling data center rooftops across the country.

“These [data centers] are further melding military and civilian infrastructure,” said Kalpouzos, “and together with the increasingly permissive rules of engagement adopted by the U.S. and Israel, are potentially drawing in larger sectors of the economy and society in what is targeted and destroyed.”

The post Data Centers Are Military Targets Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, announced the company’s big win with the Defense Department in a post on X on February 27.

“Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” he wrote. The Pentagon “agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”

The deal came after the very public implosion of what was to be a similar contract between the U.S. military and Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s chief rivals. Anthropic had said negotiations collapsed because it could not enshrine prohibitions against killer robots and domestic spying in its contract. The company’s insistence on these two points earned it the wrath of the Pentagon and President Donald Trump, who ordered the government to phase out use of Anthropic’s tools within six months.

But if the government booted Anthropic for refusing mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, how could OpenAI take over the contract without having the same problem?

OpenAI has attempted to square this circle through a string of posts to X by company executives and researchers, including Katrina Mulligan, its national security chief, and a claim by Altman that the company negotiated stricter protections around domestic surveillance.

The company and the government, however, are not releasing the only proof that matters: the contract itself.

The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

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OpenAI and company personnel contacted by The Intercept did not respond when asked for specific contract language. Company spokesperson Kate Waters did not respond to questions, sending The Intercept only links to prior public statements from Altman.

(In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

So far, OpenAI has released only snippets of the deal’s language loaded with PR-speak and national security jargon. Without being able to verify the company’s claims, Altman’s pitch to the world comes down to one premise: Trust me — along with Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — to do the right thing.

Following widespread criticism of these vagaries, Altman said earlier this week that the firm was able to quickly negotiate into its contract stricter terms with the Pentagon. These additions, Altman said, include language the company claims will stop domestic spying and collaboration with the National Security Agency.

But the company’s muddled messaging throughout the week only raised more questions about OpenAI’s willingness to do the federal government’s bidding.

“We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear,” Altman posted on Monday, using Trump’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.

“The Department also affirmed that our services will not be used by Department of War intelligence agencies (for example, the NSA),” Altman continued. “Any services to those agencies would require a follow-on modification to our contract.”

Since OpenAI has not released the contract, it’s unclear if the Pentagon’s affirmation is actually reflected in binding contract language.

Mulligan at first responded to criticism of the company’s deal with a pledge to release a “clear and more comprehensive explanation” of the relevant terms of the contract. On Tuesday, having failed to deliver such an explanation, she told one concerned X user, “I do not agree that I’m obligated to share contract language with you.”

She added, “For the record, I would want to work with NSA if the right safeguards were in place,” but did not specify what these safeguards might be.

Former military officials told The Intercept they had grave concerns about the arrangement based on what’s been made public. “I’m not confident in the language at all. And in some parts I don’t even believe it,” said Brad Carson, who previously served as under secretary of the Army during the Obama administration and is co-founder of Public First, a super PAC that lobbies in favor of AI safety regulation and is funded in part by Anthropic.

Carson noted that blocking Pentagon spy agencies like the NSA or National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency would ostensibly prevent usage of OpenAI’s tools in pressing intelligence analysis contexts, like the ongoing war against Iran. “I don’t believe that provision is in the contract. I say that reluctantly, but I don’t,” Carson added.

A former Pentagon official who worked on military artificial intelligence applications told The Intercept the caveats around “intentional” surveillance are worryingly unclear. “That’s the get out of jail free card right there,” this source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview. “The language gives them enough flexibility to still do whatever the fuck they want, more or less, and then say, whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to.”

“There is nothing OpenAI can do to clarify this except release the contract,” former Department of Justice National Security Division attorney Alan Rozenshtein said. Rozenshtein described OpenAI’s attempt to sell its contract to the public without letting the public read the contract as “not sustainable” and “bizarre.” If OpenAI will restrict its tools from the NSA, with its long-documented history of extra-constitutional dragnet domestic surveillance, this would be memorialized in the contract, not a tweet, he said. But if OpenAI has indeed come to any such agreement with the government, it is asking the world to take it as an article of faith.

“It’s quite possible that OpenAI understands that these red lines are fake, but has written a contract to give them some PR coverage. That would be bad because that feels pretty dishonest,” Rozenshtein added. “Or it’s possible that OpenAI has a different understanding of its own contract than what DOD understands the contract to be. Which is a bad position to be in, and suggests that this contract negotiation has not been done skillfully.”

Potentially undermining OpenAI’s credibility is that some of its public outreach has been simply untrue. Asked by an X user whether the contract would permit the Pentagon “[g]etting and/or analyzing commercially available data at scale,” Mulligan replied, “The Pentagon has no legal authority to do this.” This is false, at least according to the Pentagon. A declassified 2022 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence provided an overview of the collection of commercially available data by the government, including the Department of Defense — exactly the activity Mulligan was asked about.

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The Pentagon’s domestic surveillance has been further established in news reports. In 2021, Motherboard reported a letter sent from Sen. Ron Wyden to the Department of Defense in which he urged then-Secretary Lloyd Austin “to release to the public information about the Department of Defense’s (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans.” A New York Times report on a related investigation by Wyden’s office that same year showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had spied on Americans’ precise movements and locations without a warrant by simply buying access to their GPS coordinates. In a letter responding to Wyden, the Pentagon said the DIA’s lawyers had blessed the surveillance.

“It is a fact that the Pentagon has both purchased and analyzed vast amounts of Americans’ location, web browsing, and other data, for years,” Wyden wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “I’ve personally revealed several of those programs, with the help of brave whistleblowers. Anyone who claims that isn’t happening simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

OpenAI’s rhetoric fails to reckon with the way the national security state has secured both secrecy and operational latitude through relying on misleading interpretation or radical ambiguity of words.

For instance, Altman shared on Monday evening a purportedly updated clause stating: “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”

The phrase “Consistent with applicable laws” sounds promising until one reflects on the fact that the government claims consistency with applicable laws in every dragnet surveillance program, drone strike, kidnapping, assassination, or invasion. “I’m saying that the programs are legal, obviously,” White House spokesperson Jay Carney told reporters in the early days after whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the NSA. (Ironically, Mulligan was part of this public relations deflection effort during her stint in the Obama National Security Council.)

The word “intentionally” provides a miles-wide wall of plausible deniability that has helped cover for decades of domestic spying. In a March 2013 Senate hearing, Wyden asked then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, under oath, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied “No, sir.” When pressed, he added “Not wittingly.” A few months later, NSA materials disclosed by Snowden would reveal this was entirely false: The agency routinely collected vast quantities of information on Americans as a routine practice.

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The Clapper episode revealed the peril of public reliance on commonsense words like “wittingly” or “intentionally” in the context of national security. Offices like the NSA or ODNI are staffed by sharp legal minds, brilliant mathematicians, accomplished engineers, and funded with billions of dollars. They do little by accident. Altman’s invocation of “intentionally” spying on Americans, like Clapper’s dodge behind the term “wittingly,” reflects what’s known in the intelligence field as “incidental collection”: a euphemism that camouflages the fact that the government historically asserts spying on Americans is legal. In this case, incidental doesn’t mean by mistake, but rather secondary; while vacuuming up unfathomably large quantities of data to surveil foreigners, for whatever reasons deemed necessary, the government has asserted its legal right to catch Americans in the process, even if they are not the actual the target.

Altman’s other revised assurances come with similar linguistic escape hatches. “For the avoidance of doubt,” he wrote on X, “the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.” Here, the word “deliberate” is load-bearing, while crucial terms like “tracking,” “surveillance,” and “monitoring” are left undefined.

“The word surveillance doesn’t even include the kind of activities that people are most concerned about,” Carson, former general counsel of the Army, said. He doubted the Pentagon, for instance, would consider using an OpenAI large language model to build intelligence dossiers on private citizens with data pulled from federal and commercial databases as an act of “surveillance.”

“They’re trying to blind you with complicated legal terms that ordinary people think mean something different entirely,” Carson said of OpenAI’s rhetoric. “But the lawyers know what it means. And the lawyers know that this is no guardrail at all.”

One’s ultimate comfort with and confidence in this occluded contract will likely be reduced to one’s opinion of the integrity of the involved parties. How one of the most secretive institutions in the world will use the technology of similarly opaque corporation will remain the stuff of trade secrecy and classified records.

Altman and Mulligan say that OpenAI engineers will make sure the Pentagon doesn’t break its commitments: “Our contract offers additional layered safeguards including our safety stack and OpenAI technical experts in the loop,” a company statement says, without explaining what its “safety stack” is or how its “technical experts” could apply oversight to the country’s single largest bureaucracy, comprised of a litany of sub-agencies and components employing over 2 million service members and nearly 800,000 civilian personnel. Indeed, in an employee all-hands meeting held Tuesday, Altman told staff that Hegseth would hold ultimate authority over how the Pentagon makes use of the contract, according to CNBC.

When it comes to honesty and a respect for the law from Altman, Trump, and Hegseth, there is good reason for skepticism.

Altman has been repeatedly accused of false statements by the people he works with. In a 2025 court filing submitted as part of an ongoing lawsuit by Elon Musk against Altman alleging OpenAI betrayed its original nonprofit mission, former OpenAI researcher Todor Markov — who now works at Anthropic — described Altman as a “person of low integrity who had directly lied to employees.” In a memo that surfaced after Altman was briefly ousted as CEO, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever alleged he had engaged in a “consistent pattern of lying” leading up to his firing.

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Nor is it always easy to pin down Altman’s ideological commitments or ethical boundaries. “Honestly, I’m scared for the lives of all of us,” Altman wrote in an October 2016 tweet. “My #1 fear w/Trump is war.” Ten years later, Altman announced his company would sell services to the Trump administration hours after it launched a new war in the Middle East. OpenAI itself was originally founded to benefit all of humanity, and the company officially prohibited the use of its technologies for warfare — until it silently deleted this prohibition from its terms of service.

The tenure of Hegseth, might prompt similar wariness. He has overseen the assassination of Iran’s leader, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s head of state, and the killing of more than 150 men either blown apart or left to die in the ocean in boat strikes, all without congressional authorization.

Trump, meanwhile, as part of a broad disregard for legal statutes or the Constitution, has refashioned the Department of Justice into his personal firm and directed his Department of Homeland Security to brutalize and warrantlessly surveil Americans across the country. Without the text of the contract in sunlight, it is ultimately these three men — and whoever succeeds them in years to come — that the world is being asked to trust. An appeal to “applicable laws” or the sanctity of contract language is only as meaningful as the people in charge want it to be.

The former Pentagon AI official said that ceding this power to Hegseth is cause for alarm even with the most diligently crafted contract. Will anyone feel they are able to speak up should someone in the military use or be ordered to abuse OpenAI’s systems in contravention of the law or the contract? “Is the one-star general going to be able to escalate — ‘Hey, this is a huge fucking national security problem’ — appropriately without the Defense Secretary moving them around?”

“My presumption is always to trust people in what they say,” said Carson, speaking of OpenAI. But following days of what he described as “change, backtracking, a bit of deception, [and] outright deception, I’m afraid I don’t really trust you on this one anymore.”

The former Pentagon official agreed: “If you trust the cabal of Sam Altman, Donald Trump, and Pete Hegseth, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

Update: March 12, 2026

This article was updated to note Brad Carson’s affiliation with a super PAC funded in part by Anthropic.

The post OpenAI on Surveillance and Autonomous Killings: You’re Going to Have to Trust Us appeared first on The Intercept.

Since 2023, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 million to improve its ability to track down payment for the services provided at its hospitals and medical clinics. Palantir, a data analysis firm that’s now a Wall Street giant thanks to its lucrative work with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, deploys its software to make more efficient the billing of Medicaid and other public benefits. That includes automated scanning of patient health notes to “increase charges captured from missed opportunities,” contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show.

Palantir’s administrative involvement in the business of healing people stands in contrast to its longtime role helping facilitate warfare, mass deportations, and dragnet surveillance.

In 2016, The Intercept revealed Palantir’s role behind XKEYSCORE, a secret NSA bulk surveillance program revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that allowed the U.S. and its allies to search the unfathomably large volumes of data they collect. The company has also attracted global scrutiny and criticism for its “strategic partnership” with the Israeli military while it was leveling Gaza.

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But it’s Palantir’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is drawing the most protest today. The company provides a variety of services to help the federal government find and deport immigrants. ICE’s Palantir-furnished case management software, for example, “plays a critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE, ensuring critical mission success,” according to federal contracting documents.

“It’s unacceptable that the same company that is targeting our neighbors for deportation and providing tools to the Israeli military is also providing software for our hospitals,” said Kenny Morris, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, which shared the contract documents with The Intercept.

Established by the state legislature, New York City Health and Hospitals is the nation’s biggest municipal health care system, administering over 70 facilities throughout New York City, including Bellevue Hospital, and providing care for over 1 million New Yorkers annually.

“NYC Health + Hospitals’ use of Palantir technology is strictly limited to revenue cycle optimization, helping the public health care system close gaps between services delivered and charges captured, protect critical revenue, and reduce avoidable denials,” spokesperson Adam Shrier told The Intercept, adding that the contract is due to expire this fall. “Ensuring that we collect all insurance revenue to which we are entitled is critical as we navigate impacts to health care coverage and insurers’ increasing use of AI technologies to review and deny claims.” Palantir spokesperson Drew Messing said the company does not use or share hospital data outside the bounds of its contract.

Palantir’s contract with New York’s public health care system allows the company to work with patients’ protected health information, or PHI. With permission from New York City Health and Hospitals, Palantir can “de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research,” the contract states. De-identification generally involves the stripping of certain revealing information, such as names, Social Security numbers, and birthdays. Such provisions are common in contracts involving health data.

Activists who oppose Palantir’s involvement in New York point to a large body of research that indicates re-identifying personal data, including in medical contexts, is often trivial.

“Any contract that shares any of New Yorkers’ highly personal data from NYC Health & Hospitals with Palantir, a key player in the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, is reckless and puts countless lives at risk,” said Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Every New Yorker, without exception, has a right to quality healthcare and city services. New Yorkers must be able to seek healthcare without fear that their intimate medical information, or immigration status, will be delivered to the federal government on a silver platter.”

Palantir has long provided similar services to the U.K. National Health Service, a business relationship that today has an increasing number of detractors. Palantir “has absolutely no place in the NHS, looking after patients’ personal data,” Green Party leader Zack Polanski recently stated in a letter to the U.K. health secretary.

Some New York-based groups feel similarly out of distrust for what the firm could do with troves of sensitive personal data.

“Palantir is targeting the exact patients that NYCHH is looking to serve,” said Jonathan Westin of the Brooklyn-based Climate Organizing Hub. “They should immediately sever their contract with Palantir and stand with the millions of immigrant New Yorkers that are being targeted by ICE in this moment.”

“The chaos Palantir is inflicting through its technology is not just limited to the kidnapping of our immigrant neighbors and the murder of heroes like our fellow nurse, Alex Pretti,” said Hannah Drummond, an Asheville, North Carolina-based nurse and organizer with National Nurses United, a nursing union. “As a nurse and patient advocate, I don’t want anything having to do with Palantir in my hospital — and neither should any elected leader who claims to represent nurses.”

Palantir’s vocally right-wing CEO Alex Karp has been a frequent critic of New York City’s newly inaugurated democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Health and Hospitals operates as a public benefit corporation, but the mayor can exert considerable influence over the network, for instance through the appointment of its board of directors. Its president, Dr. Mitchell Katz, was renominated by Mamdani, then the mayor-elect, late last year.

The mayor’s office did not respond in time for publication when asked about its stance on the contract.

Update: February 17, 2026, 6:27 p.m. ET
This post has been updated to include a statement from New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation received after publication.

The post Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars From New York City’s Public Hospitals appeared first on The Intercept.

This was a period of intense American paranoia and anger, largely spurred by the right-wing meltdown over the consecutive victories of President Barack Obama. It was also a time of post-Snowden horror, as a nation realized it lived inside an unfathomably immense government surveillance dragnet endorsed and expanded by both political parties. It was in this moment that, for a certain segment of conservatives, Jade Helm 15 became an American crisis.

A decade later, this imaginary emergency reveals much about the hucksters who pushed it and the tolerance of many Americans for state oppression — so long as they are not the intended targets. The cauldron of race hatred, federal violence, and surveillance brewed by the paranoiacs who pounced on Jade Helm has spilled over today not in the form of right-wing phobia, but right-wing policy.

In July 2015, Alex Jones, at that point still little more than a punchline, issued a dire warning on his website InfoWars: “This is an emergency broadcast,” Jones began, warning of an impending campaign to “militarize police and to put standing armies on the streets to suppress the population and to carry out political operations.”

Jones was referring to publicly released Pentagon planning documents detailing Jade Helm 15, a military training exercise throughout sparsely populated swaths of the American South, from Florida to Texas. As is often the case when the dishonest have primary documents and a vast megaphone, Jones misstated nearly every detail of the materials. A map from what was essentially a large-scale military roleplaying game labeling Texas as “hostile,” colored in red, was irrefutable evidence to Jones that the Obama administration was preparing to let loose the national security state on the conservative heartland.

All of this was simple pretext, he claimed. The White House was leveraging the national security state to build the infrastructure for the federal paramilitary occupation of the country to choke out political dissent by force. Unwanted portions of the populations would be herded into Department of Homeland Security-administered camps, warned Jones and other stalwarts of right-wing paranoia. “We’re not becoming a police state,” he told viewers. “We’re already here.”

Though there was never any factual reason to suspect Jade Helm disguised a federal takeover, the broader paranoia was anchored in some fact. Jones claimed that the training exercise was connected to the broader militarization of American police agencies, a real trend he misconstrued as a leftist scheme against his audience. “You have massive military gear being cached — armored vehicles, machine guns, helicopters, night vision, Humvees — with the police departments around the country,” Jones explained. “It’s about suppressing the patriot population.”

Jones was not alone. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott quickly endorsed InfoWars’ ravings, deploying the state guard to “monitor” Jade Helm so that “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” as he put it in an April 2015 letter ordering their mobilization. Former Texas congressman Louie Gohmert suggested the White House was hoping to provoke an armed confrontation between the military and the administration’s critics. “It is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious,” he said. “I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty,” agreed Sen. Ted Cruz.

Some Americans heeded the warning. The New York Times interviewed a Texas doctor stockpiling ammunition. Locals organized Jade Helm volunteer groups that monitored and recorded military movement. The Oath Keepers, a prominent American anti-government militia, described Jade Helm on its website as a “Portentous government plan, a pre-fabricated and pre-constructed umbrella under which a black op by the Deep State’s compartmentalized agencies could possibly ‘Go Live’ in a fantastic sort of Shock and Awe False Flag psycho-coup to jar the public mind of America through fear into acceptance of some nefarious policy the government desired, such as the establishment of Martial Law and the complete loss of individual liberty and our Constitution.”

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These days, Jade Helm isn’t talked about much because nothing happened. But in the decade since, there has been a near-total inversion of the panic that Jade Helm sparked. Largely unconcerned and frequently unconstrained by law, Trump has found in his Department of Homeland Security what Jones warned was coming a decade ago: a paramilitary force to terrorize political opponents and demographic undesirables. Eleven years past schedule, Trump and a docile American right wing have finally delivered the Jade Helm presidency.

Armored personnel carriers today carry masked, heavily armed, pointlessly camouflaged federal commandos through American cities that voted against the president, backed by a sophisticated national surveillance apparatus. Trump and his lieutenants, beneficiaries of an American right-wing reshaped by the likes of Jones and his audience, make real and explicit the quiet fantasizing attributed to Obama’s during Jade Helm, speaking openly of American communities as hives of the enemy. In September, Trump announced impending deportation operations in Chicago with a doctored image depicting the city under attack by napalm, captioned “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The notion of ideological foes not as electoral enemies but legitimate targets of violence is no longer the stuff of conspiracy podcasts, but the political mainstream. Trump referred to a need to stamp out the “enemy within” the United States in September speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, suggesting the unconstitutional use of the military to “handle” them, and mused about using American cities as “training grounds” for the Pentagon. Gun-toting agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Custom and Border Protection are the foot soldiers of a government that describes its people as terrorists. They have been joined at times by actual soldiers, Marines and National Guard members, deployed illegally in cities like Los Angeles where the president’s policies are unpopular.

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Since Trump’s speech, DHS agents have shot 12 people, killing four of them. Minneapolis residents describe the experience of ICE and CBP’s surge as something akin to a military occupation. Where Obama’s Jade Helm fell short in the collective imaginations of the InfoWars right, Trump’s second term has succeeded in wielding DHS as an ideological cudgel. After Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti were gunned down by DHS agents, the department’s justification for dispensing the death penalty on the sidewalk — that they were both domestic terrorists bent on killing federal personnel — quickly disintegrated in the face of video evidence. All that was left was a rationale more foreboding than anything Jade Helm truthers attributed to the Obama administration, a shrug that boils down to this brutal view: That’s what they get for wanting this to stop. 

“Was he simply walking by and just happened to walk into a law enforcement situation and try to direct traffic and stand in the middle of the road, and then assault, delay, and obstruct law enforcement?” CBP’s Greg Bovino wondered of Pretti at a press conference. “Or was he there for a reason?” (Pretti’s reason for being there that day was clear, having been filmed from multiple angles: to legally observe and record the agents who then killed him.)

The idea that merely opposing the president’s immigration policy is reason enough to warrant summary execution is, if not stated outright, now on the lips of many right-wing commentators. It’s an implicit threat that the next person to record a masked cop on their block could receive the same.

Immigration authorities have brought to life the id of Jade Helm not just through overt displays of force, but also through the vast intelligence and surveillance apparatus within DHS.

In May 2015, InfoWars correspondent David Knight warned that Jade Helm would involve the collection and exploitation of enormous reams of personal information. “They analyze the data, and then because you stick out in some way, now you’re treated as if you’ve already had due process, as if you’ve already been found guilty of a crime,” resulting in the government kicking down the doors of innocent people. “If you understand the technology that’s involved, then you’ll see that Jade Helm is more of an intelligence operation using geospatial intelligence mapping,” claimed InfoWars correspondent Lee Ann McAdoo. “And as information from low-level surveillance technologies such as stingrays and predictive policing programs are all getting siphoned up into NSA data centers, a detailed global map will continue to grow with near-endless stats on all individuals.”

This much was true — in broad strokes, if not the specifics — back in 2015 and even more so today. DHS has steadily amassed for itself a security state within the security state, one now plump with record funding under a Trump second term clinched with the promise of a ruthless immigration crackdown. “With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote last month, “ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.”

Thanks to the unregulated market in commercial surveillance technology, DHS has little need for a spy agency like the NSA. Last fall, ICE reactivated its contract with spyware-maker Paragon, which makes software that can remotely break into a smartphone. DHS also makes ample use of phone-cracking tools like Cellebrite, and has been purchasing warrantless access to cellphone location data since at least 2017, providing a turn-key means of tracking virtually anyone, anywhere, while bypassing the Fourth Amendment entirely. A 2023 DHS inspector general’s report found that both ICE and CBP consistently used this data illegally. Smartphone-based face recognition makes suspects out of anyone DHS agents might encounter on the street, immigrant and citizen alike.

Some in the InfoWars orbit speculated the word Jade itself “may or may not be an acronym for a military-developed artificial intelligence,” columnist Mark Saal observed in 2015. Like other facets of the Jade Helm freakout, this fear managed to be prescient despite its own baselessness. What’s unimpeachably true today is that DHS uses a litany of sophisticated artificial intelligence tools, including those provided by Palantir, a longtime military and intelligence contractor that has previously aided the NSA and continues to provide analytic and database services to ICE.

The role of Palantir alone within DHS is the stuff of InfoWars reverie: The company is building a tool “that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address,” according to a recent report by 404 Media. In contract documents renewing ICE’s use of Palantir case management software reviewed by The Intercept, the agency notes that the company has a “critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE.” The case management system alone ingests data from across the federal government, including the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services, Department of Justice databases, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, and the Office of Biometric Identity Management, among others.

Omnipresent data collection in the name of Homeland Security has allowed for novel means of taunting and intimidating the president’s critics. In a video clip that began circulating on X last week, a masked DHS agent is seen recording a car’s license plate with his phone.

“Why are you taking my information down?” the woman asks. “Because we have a nice little database,” the agent replies. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

It’s unclear what “little database” the agent was referring to, or on what grounds recording a video on a public street would be considered an act of terrorism. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept there is “no such database.” McLaughlin would not answer when asked repeatedly whether DHS endorsed its personnel threatening to place people on a domestic terrorism database it now claims does not exist.

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A national security presidential memorandum issued by Trump in September, known as NSPM-7, explicitly labels certain political and ideological stances — including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” along with unspecified views on race and gender — as forms of domestic terrorism.

The Jade Helm presidency hasn’t matched the scope and scale of what Jones et al. hallucinated a decade ago. But Trump’s DHS — a department already plagued by bipartisan abuse, brutalization, and overreach since its founding — represents in spirit and practice exactly what far-right and right-libertarians once warned was a genuine emergency.

Though it made no effort to attach itself to facts, Jade Helm fearmongering touched, glancingly, on some uncomfortable truths: The federal government is willing to use force, surveillance, and extraconstitutional power to suppress dissent. But the greater truth revealed in the intervening decade is that for many Americans, these abuses aren’t a problem so long as it’s someone else’s back pushed onto the concrete, someone else’s car windows smashed, and someone else dealing with the pain of a chemical irritant.

Far-right commentators and elected officials are making clear that their opposition was never to authoritarian violence or state terror, but instead to being subjected to that violence and terror themselves. The contingent of the country that swore to avenge Ruby Ridge and Waco now seem mostly content to cheer on more of the same beneath X videos.  

When the administration blamed Alex Pretti’s death on his wholly legal gun ownership, having failed to slander him as an “assassin,” even the National Rifle Association, which once derided federal police as “jackbooted government thugs,” felt obliged to claim he was “antagonizing” ICE, even while defending his right to bear arms.

“We now know that Alex Pretti was a violent agitator who repeatedly went out armed to deliberately instigate physical confrontations with law enforcement,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted on X. “He is not a victim. He was not a mere ‘protester.’ And he got what was coming to him. Simple as that.”

InfoWars’ Jade Helm coverage is now seemingly scrubbed from the site. With a friendly president in the White House, the publication has shifted from condemning the Pentagon as the harbinger of American apocalypse to joining its official press corps. But the spirit of the old anti-state paranoia of InfoWars remains — just inverted entirely in the state’s service.

Headlines like “Could the Minneapolis Rioters Be Using Automatic License Plate Recognition Systems?” are what the Jade Helm-believers now wonder about dragnet surveillance. “Watch Two Brave ICE Officers Fight Off A Violent Leftist Mob That Invaded Their Hotel!” is the formerly paranoid right’s assessment of DHS. The notion of camouflaged agents in the streets is cause for celebration, not an “emergency broadcast” of 2015. “A War Has Erupted On The Streets Of America, And It Is Going To End With Martial Law In Major U.S. Cities,” InfoWars warns today, paired with an AI-generated image of federal officers defending themselves from an antifa onslaught.

Eleven years after Jade Helm, this is forecast with at least a little excitement.

The post Welcome to the Jade Helm Presidency appeared first on The Intercept.

The response within Apple to Cook’s attendance of the “Melania” screening has been starkly negative, according to internal Slack logs reviewed by The Intercept. A link to an article from The Verge headlined “Here’s Tim Cook hanging out with accused rapist Brett Ratner at the Melania screening” drew a chorus of reactions, including dozens of vomiting emojis. The article prompted waves of dissent about both Cook and the company’s apparent unwillingness to condemn immigration-related violence across the United States. This level of internal anger is unusual at Apple, which has avoided the kind of political rancor that has swept rivals like Google and Microsoft.

Cook has openly embraced Trump, particularly in his second term, attending the president’s inauguration, presenting him with an engraved golden trophy, and giving money to the White House to help construct the president’s $300 million pet project ballroom.

The relative workplace calm may be over. “I hope we never find out, but I seriously started wondering what our leadership would do if an Apple employee was summarily executed by our government,” wondered one employee.

Many workers claimed hypocrisy between Apple’s longtime professed commitment to progressive values and causes and the extent to which its CEO has cozied up to the Trump administration. “But but but…. we changed the Apple website to MLK last Monday, so that cancels out.” Another pointed sarcastically to the company’s recent announcement of Black History Month Apple Watch bands. “Went to hang out with the guy who didn’t even acknowledge MLK Day and took away park access on the day,” commented one worker. “Sounds like an interesting documentary. Hopefully we’ll hear more about it through a push notification in Apple Wallet,” said another employee.

Many others expressed dismay at the fact that Apple had yet to issue any statement about violence perpetrated by Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, as it has in the past following similar national traumas. In 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd, Cook wrote an open letter condemning his killing: “We can have no society worth celebrating unless we can guarantee freedom from fear for every person who gives this country their love, labor, and life.”

Late Tuesday, Cook issued a statement expressing that he was “heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis, and my prayers and deepest sympathies are with the families, with the communities, and with everyone that’s been affected.”

“This is a time for deescalation. I believe America is strongest when we live up to our highest ideals, when we treat everyone with dignity and respect no matter who they are or where they’re from, and when we embrace our shared humanity,” Cook wrote. “This is something Apple has always advocated for. I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.”

Prior to the release of Cook’s public statement, some staff called the company’s silence was unacceptable. “As a lifelong Minnesotan and an Apple badged employee for over half my life I feel pretty abandoned by the company that has told me it stands for humanity more times than I can count,” wrote another worker. “Silence on ICE violence speaks volumes.” Another pointed out the “Three retail locations in the Twin Cities and not a peep” from Cook. “This isn’t leadership. This is an absence of leadership.” To which a colleague quickly countered: “I disagree, this IS leadership. This is intentional, nobody travels to the white house by mistake.”

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An Apple employee who has spent decades at the company said they had noticed a marked cultural and political shift within Apple under Cook’s tenure. “A lot of people are talking about how Steve Jobs would have never given a gold bar to a politician,” referring to the 24-karat gold trophy Cook presented Trump at the White House in August.

“Typically, before the genocide in Gaza started, Tim would write an email about every major horrible event that would happen in support of workers at the company who might be related to those events,” said the employee, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. This worker said that Apple employs a large number of immigrants, making violence at the hands of ICE and CBP as personal as anything the company has ever expressed sympathy over. “There has been a dramatic shift in the way Apple operates worldwide. Before they would focus on quality and design and doing the right thing, and now they’re just getting things out quickly and pandering to fascists.”

Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Internal debate differed on whether Cook should issue a statement internally, publicly, or both. “We aren’t asking for Tim to make a private statement to employees,” argued one worker. “We’re asking him to take a stand for basic human rights and morals. Or at the very least to not be seen smiling and hobnobbing with the people treading on these values on a constant basis. Oh and not openly bribing them with tacky gold bars that very very clearly violate the Business Conduct Training that we are all required to repeat on an annual basis.”

Some workers have argued that, while unpalatable, Cook’s friendly relationship with the White House and silence on ICE or CBP is simply the job of the chief executive. The unpleasant reality of his fiduciary duty “means he needs to pander to criminals who want to destroy our democracy in order to ward off tariffs that would tank iPhone sales,” suggested one employee. “From my perspective, he’s choosing to take the hit to his reputation for the benefit of his employees, and for the customers that depend on our products and services,” argued another Slack commenter. “He’s truly in a tough position. An easy way out would have been to retire, but Tim doesn’t strike me as someone that would take the easy way out. He’s likely weighing the costs of every significant action.”

Some pointed out that, from a purely self-interested public relations standpoint, the corporate silence was counterproductive. “Just imagine for a second if Apple was the first big tech company to actually stand up for people’s rights against the admin,” wrote one. “Can’t think of a better PR move at this moment.”

A second Apple employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Intercept that the current dismay is without precedent. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen our internal Slack so busy with so many worried discussions going on at the same time on similar topics,” they said. “Apple leadership used to be an inspiration for many of us due to the importance given to ethical products, but these days it feels more and more that the folks that are supposed to represent Apple’s values wouldn’t even pass the internal business conduct training that most employees have to attend.”

Update: January 28, 2026

This article has been updated to include a public statement from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

The post Apple Workers Are Livid That Tim Cook Saw “Melania” Movie Hours After CBP Killed Pretti appeared first on The Intercept.

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Beginning nearly a year ago, DOGE embarked on an aggressive and legally dubious effort to gut the administrative state by unilaterally shuttering programs, pushing out personnel, and terminating contracts. Its effort to downsize the government leaned on the Office of Personnel Management’s “Deferred Resignation Program,” essentially a voluntary buyout plan that offered nearly 2 million federal employees the option of entering administrative leave rather than working under the second Trump administration. In the ensuing HR chaos, the Washington Post reported that “the employees who have resigned amount to about 6.7 percent of the government’s civilian workforce of 2.3 million people.”

Defenders of DOGE, including Musk, have claimed the project solely ferreted out fraud, waste, and abuse. But according to a December 2025 contracting memo from the Defense Information Systems Agency, DOGE’s tactics caused major problems at the Pentagon’s IT office — which is core to the operation of the U.S. military.

The memo describes how DISA’s Command, Control, Communications, and Computers Enterprise Directorate, known as J6, was hobbled by DOGE cuts to such an extent that it was unable to obtain necessary software. This unit is responsible for maintaining secure channels that keep the Pentagon connected to military assets around the world, including nuclear capabilities.

“During calendar year 2025, the DISA/J6 program office has been unexpectedly and significantly impacted by Government programs that incentivized personnel separation or extended periods of leave,” the memo reads, “e.g., Deferred Resignation Program, Voluntary Early Retirement Authority, Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments, Paid Parental Leave.”

A second DISA memo notes that the Deferred Resignation Program resulted in the departure of an officer responsible for an important Pentagon cloud-computing contract, resulting in that contract expiring entirely. The DOGE-induced staffing shortage resulted in a situation, according to the memo, where DISA’s systems faced “extreme risk for loss of service” across the Department of Defense.

While DISA operates behind the scenes, its globe-spanning networks are critical to the armed forces, explained DISA J6’s then-director Sharon Woods in a Pentagon-produced June 2025 interview: “Command, Control, Communications, and Computers — it is what underlies everything and the department’s ability to communicate with itself.” Asked what would happen on a day where DISA J6 couldn’t operate, Woods replied, “In my mind, it cripples the Department [of Defense]… This is really a mission where failure is not an option.”

DISA is not the only arm of the Pentagon hindered by Musk’s cuts. Stars and Stripes reported last week that Fort Greely, an intercontinental ballistic missile interception facility in Alaska, was struggling to feed its personnel because of “the government’s loss of essential civilian positions due to the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), retirements and the federal hiring freeze.”

A recent procurement memo from the U.S. military academy at West Point, New York, reviewed by The Intercept stated the school was similarly facing a “potential disruption in food service operations resulting from the Government’s loss of 26 positions due to the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), retirements, and the hiring freeze.”

At a May 2025 conference hosted by U.S. Army Mission Installation Contracting Command, an official acknowledged that “We have been cut significantly” due to the Deferred Resignation Program.

DISA did not respond to a request for comment.

The post DOGE Cuts “Unexpectedly and Significantly Impacted” Critical Pentagon Unit appeared first on The Intercept.

Data centers are giant warehouses for computer chips that run continuously, with up to hundreds of thousands of processors packed closely together taking up a mammoth footprint: An Indiana data center complex run by Amazon, for example, takes up more real estate than seven football stadiums. To operate nonstop, they consume immense amounts of electricity, which in turn is converted to intense heat, requiring constant cooling with fans and pumped-in water.

Fueled by the ongoing boom in artificial intelligence, Big Tech is so desperate to power its data centers that Microsoft successfully convinced the Trump administration to restart operations at the benighted Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

The data center surge has spawned a backlash, as communities grow skeptical about their environmental toll and ultimate utility of the machine learning systems they serve.

It’s in this climate that technologists, investors, and the world’s richest humans are now talking about bypassing Earth and its logistical hurdles by putting data centers in space. And if you take at face value the words of tech barons whose wealth in no small part relies on overstating what their companies may someday achieve, they’re not just novel but inevitable. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Jeff Bezos’s space launch firm Blue Origin has been working on an orbital data center project for over a year. Elon Musk, not known for accurate predictions, has publicly committed SpaceX to putting AI data centers in orbit. “There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently told Fox News.

The prospect of taking a trillion-dollar industry that is already experiencing a historic boom and literally shooting it toward the moon has understandably created a frenzy within a frenzy.

But large questions remain: Is it even possible? And if it is, why bother?

Orbital computing boosters claim the reason is simple: Data centers are very hot. Space, as sci-fi teaches us, is very cold. Data centers need a lot of energy, and the sun produces an effectively infinite supply of it. The thinking goes that with free ambient cooling and constant access to solar power (unlike terrestrial solar panels, these wouldn’t have to contend with Earth’s rotation or atmosphere), an orbital data center could beam its information back to our planet with few earthly downsides.

Experts who spoke to The Intercept say it’s nowhere near this simple. Despite the fact that putting small objects like satellites into orbit has become significantly cheaper than decades past, doing anything in space remains an extremely expensive and difficult enterprise compared to doing it on the ground. And even if the engineering problems are surmountable, some question the point.

There are varying visions of space data centers. Musk’s idea seems to be based on constellations of smaller satellites carrying computing hardware; others envision massive spacecraft the size of skyscrapers filled with graphics-processing units.

“If you wanted to spend enough money, you could absolutely put GPUs in space and have them do the things that data centers are supposed to do,” Matthew Buckley, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University, told The Intercept. “The reason that I would say it is an incredibly stupid idea is that in order to make them work, you’re going to have to spend incredible amounts of money to keep them from melting. And you could solve that problem much easier by not launching them into space. And it is unclear why on earth you would want to do that.”

Outer space is largely a cold vacuum, but objects in Earth’s orbit are subjected to temperature extremes. Ali Hajimiri, an electrical engineering professor at Caltech, pushed back on the “general notion of a cold vacuum of space. Actually space can become very cold or very hot.” The International Space Station, carrying a computer payload producing a mere fraction of the heat of a large-scale data center, has to carefully contend with temperatures of between 250 and -250 degrees Fahrenheit depending on whether it’s exposed to direct sunlight. But even when an object in orbit is subjected to extreme cold temperatures, the nature of space’s vacuum behaves drastically differently than hot and cold within our atmosphere.

On Earth, you can remove a boiling kettle from the stove and the energy within will gradually transfer to the surrounding air, cooling the vessel and its contents back to room temperature. In space, there is no air, water, or other medium to which one can transfer heat, thus the coldness of space would do nothing to cool a scorching hot piece of silicon. “If you put a GPU in space and powered it, it would melt,” said Buckley.

Without ambient air or any other medium to ferry away heat through convection, a hypothetical space data center would need to rely on thermal radiation. Washington-based Starcloud is among the most prominent startups pitching orbital data centers as a concept, and says it’s working to build a 5 gigawatt space facility, a staggering figure that represents about 10 percent of all electricity currently consumed by data centers on Earth, according to a recent Goldman Sachs estimate. Starcloud says it would get rid of the astounding amount of heat generated in such a facility through the use of enormous radiators — essentially large pieces of metal that absorb the heat directly from the onboard chips and then radiates it out into space. Physics dictates that this would require radiators unlike anything that’s ever been constructed: Starcloud says it would use 16 square kilometers of radiators, taller and wider than four Burj Khalifa skyscrapers stacked end to end. How such a thing would be launched into or constructed in space, a project without any precedent, is unclear.

“If you want to create this heat transfer system, either heat pipes and all those things, those things are heavy,” Hajimiri said. “And heavy is not good for space.”

Then there’s the sun. Proponents of space data centers also point to the fact that a solar panel in space can receive uninterrupted solar energy without diminishment from weather or Earth’s atmosphere. But all of this sunlight generates extreme heat of its own, requiring further cooling. And any efficiency gained by putting the panels closer to the sun, argued Buckley, is largely negated by the extreme inefficiency of having to put them into space in the first place.

Other unsolved problems abound. While space is thought of as empty, it’s filled with radiation that can damage computer hardware or corrupt the data stored within. Earth’s orbit is also filled with debris. This orbiting space trash presents the biggest hurdle, according to John Crassidis, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at the University of Buffalo. Near-misses and space junk collisions are a real danger for satellites — objects a small fraction of the size of mammoth orbiting data centers. Last month, Starlink executive Michael Nicolls announced one of the company’s satellites — infinitesimal compared to Starcloud’s plan — nearly collided with a Chinese satellite. “This stuff’s going 17,500 miles per hour,” Crassidis said of space debris, and even contact with a tiny fragment could be catastrophic. “It doesn’t take too big of a hole. I think it’s half an inch radius to explode the whole [International] Space Station.”

Though Crassidis doesn’t object to companies pursuing these projects, he cautions that flooding Earth’s orbit with chip-ferrying satellites could make a dangerous situation worse. He pointed to Kessler syndrome, a theoretical scenario in which low Earth orbit becomes so crowded with objects and trash that it becomes unusable by humans.

Any floating data center would also have to contend with the difficulties of communicating between space and Earth; even Starlink’s broadband satellites are extremely slow compared to the fiber optic connections plugged into terrestrial data centers. University of Pittsburgh electrical and computer engineering department chair Alan George told The Intercept that sending data between Earth and space is just one of “many extreme challenges to overcome.” And if it can’t be solved, the whole endeavor is for naught. “Bold claims are being made based upon technologies that don’t yet exist,” he said.

“If you have hundreds of billions of dollars, you can launch enough infrastructure to keep it cool. Why would you do that when you can just put it an ugly building at the end of the block?” said Buckley. “I’m not saying that you could never do this if you just decided to set money on fire. I’m just saying I don’t understand the motivation to do this.”

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The motivation may be as financial as it is scientific. SpaceX is rumored to be approaching an initial public offering that could potentially be bolstered by plans for orbiting data centers, and any Big Tech entity knows it can reap publicity and share price benefits by mentioning “AI” at any available opportunity. Space is trendy, “AI” is booming (or bubbling), and the combination of the two could spur further investment.

Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston was unfazed by these challenges in an interview with The Intercept. He said his company’s vision of a 5-gigawatt facility is 10 to 15 years away, by which point he believes SpaceX launches will be so frequent and carry such huge payloads that bringing the raw materials to orbit shouldn’t be difficult. Johnston dismissed as “annoying” criticism of his company’s plan to cool hot chips in space. “Nothing we’re doing is against the laws of physics and nothing requires new physics to make it work. It’s not like we’re building a fusion reactor.”

In his view, it’s simply a matter of scaling up existing technology. Johnston said he doesn’t believe his company will compete with Earth-based facilities for several years, at which point he thinks Starcloud will begin launching large constellations of smaller satellites carrying computing hardware that will mesh together, rather than one giant object. This modular approach, Johnston said, will also take care of the obsolescence issue: Older hardware can simply be left to burn up upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. For the time being, he said the company will cater to the specialized needs like processing satellite imagery, with potential customers including the U.S. Department of War. The company counts In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the U.S. intelligence community, among its backers. Johnston told The Intercept that the “CIA is interested in what we’re doing,” but declined to comment further.

Experts who spoke with The Intercept didn’t wholly oppose these projects because the sheer enormity of the challenge could yield engineering breakthroughs. But many also suggested that the mammoth investment in resources and ingenuity required would be better spent on the surface.

Hajimiri says he believes the engineering problems could be solved eventually, and that crazy ideas can yield scientific and societal benefits. A decade ago, he pursued a similar project on a far smaller scale. He and his team dropped it for simple reason: Chips need to be replaced. The processors used to train state-of-the-art large language models are rendered obsolete in a matter of years. It’s this need for newer and better chips that has taken the value of chipmakers like Nvidia into the stratosphere. But it’s not just buying the latest and greatest. Things go wrong: Processors sometimes fail, power supplies burn out, wiring needs to be fixed. In earthly data centers, the solution is easy. Technicians use their hands to pop in a replacement processor, for example.

“Data centers need full-time humans to deal with the occasional hardware emergencies,” said Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who works on high-performance computing. “And I don’t know how this is gonna be dealt with in space.” Johnston predicted that robot repairmen would eventually solve this problem.

When an orbital data center’s hardware grows obsolete, companies would need to figure out how to upgrade them. Otherwise it becomes a piece of space trash two-and-a-half miles across.

Jesse Jenkins, an engineering professor at Princeton who works on energy technologies, said the tech world is simply looking in the wrong place. “The fact that we are considering building data centers in space because it’s too hard to build and power them on land should be an indictment of our ability to deploy new energy and data infrastructure at scale in the United States.”

The biggest problem is the simplest, said veteran aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip. Though the cost of putting things in space has decreased dramatically, it’s still vastly greater than building a data center on land. “Can we host a GPU in space cheaper than hosting it in a building in Oregon?” he asked. The answer remains an emphatic no.

McCalip is also skeptical of Johnston’s claim that Starcloud represents a green alternative to terrestrial data centers. Launching craft large enough and frequently enough to make orbital data centers feasible would require infeasibly vast volumes of liquid oxygen fuel, McCalip said, and manufacturing enough to match the ambitions of SpaceX (and other companies hoping to hitch a ride to orbit) would likely entail burning a lot of fossil fuels.

It’s enough to make you ask once more: Why do all of this in space?

“The benefit,” McCalip said, “would be this sort of vague ‘Humanity gets better at doing things in space.’”

Correction: January 15, 2026
Due to an editing error, a quote was misattributed. “If you have hundreds of billions of dollars, you can launch enough infrastructure to keep it cool. Why would you do that when you can just put it an ugly building at the end of the block?” was said by Matthew Buckley, not Alan George.

The post Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Putting Data Centers in Space? appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal procurement document show that on December 15, ICE inked a deal with Constellis Holdings to provide “skip tracing” services, tasking the company with hunting immigrants down and relaying their locations to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations wing for apprehension.

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Under the terms of the Trump administration’s skip tracing initiative, first reported by The Intercept, contractors will receive monetary bounties in exchange for turning over the whereabouts of specified immigrants as quickly as possible, using whatever physical and digital surveillance tools they see fit.

Constellis was formed in 2014 through the merger of Academi, previously known as Blackwater, and Triple Canopy, a rival mercenary contractor. The combined companies and their subsidiaries have reaped billions from contracts for guarding foreign military installations, embassies, and domestic properties, along with work for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. spy agencies.

Blackwater, founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, renamed itself multiple times over the years after it sparked international scandal for its violent work in Iraq. In 2007, Blackwater mercenaries massacred 14 civilians in Baghdad; several of its contractors serving prison sentences for the killings were pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020.

Prince resigned as CEO of Blackwater in 2009, and Constellis says it has no relationship with him.

Though there are no ties between them, Constellis’s move to serve as a bounty hunter for ICE aligns with Prince’s reported interest in privatizing immigration enforcement.

In February, Politico reported that Prince — a longtime and steadfast Trump ally — was among a group of military contractors who urged the federal government to employ a “Skip Tracing Team” and “bounty program which provides a cash reward” to incentivize the rapid tracking of immigrants. The proposal suggested that, due to a lack of federal manpower, ICE should deputize private citizens to help track down immigrants.

The Trump administration wound up hewing closely to the spirit of the proposal, earmarking over $1 billion for skip tracing work, much of it going to companies with military and intelligence contracting experience like Constellis. Federal records show the government has so far paid Constellis $1.5 million, with the potential for the total to grow to more than $113 million by the contract’s end in 2027.

Records do not provide any information about how Omniplex World Services, the Constellis subsidiary named in the contract, will track immigrants on ICE’s target list, stating only that the work “provides ICE with Skip Tracing services nationwide.”

Contract materials indicate that companies can use whatever techniques and technologies they believe will get the job done fastest.

Omniplex has provided investigative services like personnel background checks to DHS and the U.S. intelligence community for decades.

Constellis did not respond to a request for comment or questions about how it will locate migrants for ICE, but the company’s past experience in verifying details of an individual’s private life, including their internet activity, would be of clear utility for a skip tracing campaign.

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According to program materials reviewed by The Intercept, bounty hunters hired by ICE will not be given any credentials identifying them as agents of the Department of Homeland Security as they surveil assigned targets’ homes and workplaces.

Domestic work could also be a crucial revenue bump for Constellis, which has reportedly seen revenues fall in recent years as the U.S. spent less guarding embassies and other facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Constellis, though, remains active in the Middle East, including through a contract to guard an American radar installation inside Israel.

The company has sought out business with dubious humanitarian implications. In 2024, Drop Site News reported Constellis was in talks to deploy mercenaries inside the Gaza Strip, and the company secured a $250 million construction contract at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, earlier this year.

The post Blackwater Successor Hunts Immigrants for ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

In November, ICE launched a process to get private sector “skip tracing” services, where corporate investigators use digital snooping tools and on-the-ground surveillance to track immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses. ICE procurement records indicate the agency will be targeting as many as 1.5 million immigrants in the U.S.

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Taken together, records show the 10 companies have made over $1 million to date — and stand to make over $1 billion by the contract’s end in 2027. Some of the companies’ roles in the bounty hunting program have been previously reported, including by The Intercept, but others — such as Bluehawk, EnProVera, and Gravitas — are being revealed here for the first time. (None of the 10 companies commented for this story.)

The bonanza for federal contractors comes as the Trump administration’s focus on deportations has led to a massive increase in ICE’s budget. The companies range from those with extensive experience doing intelligence work to those with more mundane government contracting experience, like finding janitors for federal agencies.

Among the companies poised to cash in on the bounty hunting program, the largest potential haul — over $365 million — could go to Capgemini Government Solutions, a McLean, Virginia-based federal consultancy that has a long track record working for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, including providing intelligence services for ICE.

Florida-based Bluehawk LLC stands to reap the second largest payout from bounty hunting, at over $200 million. Bluehawk is a longtime contractor for the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, providing intelligence collection and analysis, as well as counterintelligence services.

In September, Bluehawk announced it was beginning counterintelligence work for the Department of Homeland Security. Like some of the other contractors tapped by ICE, the company is focusing on immigration after honing its capabilities doing war on terror-era military and intelligence operations. The company’s advisers include former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Ronald Burgess and Dell Dailey, a retired Army lieutenant general who ran U.S. Joint Special Operations Command following the September 11 attacks.

Government Support Services, a contractor that helps staff roles for janitors, groundskeepers, and security guards at agencies across the federal government, could make upward of $55 million on the bounty hunting program.

EnProVera, another company signed up for a contract on the bounty hunting program, also boasts a broad range of federal contracts. The company advertises a variety of intelligence-gathering and investigative services on its website, promoting its work with Customs and Border Protection.

EnProVera CEO Larry Grant’s past work experience includes “conducting clandestine overseas operations, authoring a highly classified study of a foreign nation’s technical capabilities,” and “architecting intelligence systems support to combat operations,” according to his biography page.

EnProVera could make nearly $3 million by the contract’s end.

Constellation Inc., which has previously landed administrative contracts across the Department of Homeland Security, is looking at a potential $58 million payday from bounty hunting.

SOS International, or SOSi, another experienced military contractor, landed a bounty hunting contract around when the program was revealed in November. SOSI’s skip-tracing work for the program, which was first reported by The Lever, could earn the firm up to $123 million. The company is a longtime military contractor whose past work spans operating a major military base in Iraq to operating overseas propaganda campaigns. SOSi’s website notes the company uses large language models in its government work.

Other firms have more traditional private investigative backgrounds.

Gravitas Investigations, which could make over $32 million through the bounty hunting contract, says it offers “comprehensive surveillance operations.” The company touts its skill at locating anyone using a combination of digital sleuthing and real-world tracking.

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“We go where your Subject goes,” its website says. “We follow on foot, in a vehicle, onto public property, and anywhere legal. Our surveillance operatives covertly document your Subject’s activities with a handheld, high-definition camcorders, and covert cameras.”

Gravitas says it makes extensive use of social media and other online data to pinpoint individuals on its customers’ behalf.

The company Fraud Inc. “strives to validate our clients’ suspicions,” according to its website, using a variety of public and private databases, social media digging, and video surveillance. “We also can obtain legally high-altitude video,” it boasts.

Among the more novel firms on the bounty hunting contract is AI Solutions 87, whose role was recently reported by 404 Media. The company is providing “AI agents” to ICE that it says can autonomously track “people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly.”

Perhaps the most provocative bounty hunting firm is BI Incorporated, an immigrant-tracking subsidiary of GEO Group, the for-profit prison giant whose fortunes have rapidly climbed following Trump’s reelection and the funding boom for deportation operations. With lucrative contracts for both hunting and imprisoning immigrants — its bounty hunting work could net $121 million by 2027 — GEO Group now stands to generate revenue through multiple stages of the administration’s ongoing deportation campaign.

The post 10 Companies Have Already Made $1 Million as ICE Bounty Hunters. We Found Them. appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE has secured a deal with surveillance firm BI Incorporated as part of a new program, first reported in October by The Intercept, to use private bounty hunters to determine the locations of immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses.

BI, which was acquired by the GEO Group in 2011, is one of several firms hired by ICE to provide “skip tracing” services, in which its teams of corporate investigators will use surveillance to track immigrants across the country to their homes and places of work so federal agents can easily swoop in and make arrests.

Records show ICE has already paid BI $1.6 million, with the potential for the contract to grow to as much as $121 million by the time it concludes in 2027.

ICE’s push to privatize its hunt for immigrants has drawn the scrutiny of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who warned it “invites the very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent.”

Neither BI Incorporated nor GEO Group immediately responded to a request for comment.

The deal illustrates a strategy of vertical integration within GEO Group, which has found a growing line of business operating for-profit immigration detention centers under the second Trump administration. In this case, the corporation stands to be paid by the federal government to both find immigrants and then to imprison them.

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Shares of GEO Group, which donated to both Trump’s reelection campaign and his inaugural fund, spiked following his 2024 victory. Trump’s return to office has proven fortuitous for GEO Group: The president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” earmarked $45 billion for jailing immigrants. “This is a unique moment in our company’s history,” GEO Group CEO J. David Donahue told investors in May, “and we believe we are well-positioned to meet this unprecedented opportunity.”

GEO Group has faced decades of criticism over alleged mismanagement of its facilities and claims of rampant abuse of inmates. In August, The Intercept reported the suicide of a Chinese immigrant held at a GEO Group-operated prison in Pennsylvania. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal complaint over the facility in July, criticizing “horrific conditions” at the prison, including repeated instances of medical neglect.

In 2023, GEO Group was hit by a class-action lawsuit alleging the “months-long poisoning” from a chemical disinfectant of more than 1,300 inmates at a California immigration detention center. In May, Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, jailed for her criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, alleged her GEO Group-managed jail delayed treatment while she experienced an asthma attack.

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The ICE contract record does not say whether BI would provide on-the-ground bounty hunting services, software-based investigative services, or a combination of both. ICE has previously told potential bounty hunting contractors, “It is dependent upon the vendor to complete the work required by contract,” but “Should a vendor choose to subcontract, that is at their discretion,” according to procurement correspondence reviewed by The Intercept.

BI has a long history in immigrant surveillance, having received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to date through past contracts for ankle monitor-based tracking. The company specializes in remote surveillance and person-monitoring services, including sales of GPS bracelets and other tracking devices. “Location tracking enables individuals to work and live in the community while being monitored closely for curfews, movement, and more,” according to the company’s website. “BI offers ankle bracelet, wrist-worn, and mobile tracking solutions to meet the needs of varying risk levels.”

BI also touts its suite of software products, including case management applications for monitoring the movements of immigrants and other targets, as well as tools that allow agencies to chart a target’s “geographic and spatial location data” across Google Maps. It is unknown if the company has access to commercial mobile device locational data, or relies solely on body-mounted trackers.

But with many years of detailed GPS data pertaining to the every movement of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, BI and GEO Group hold a trove of locational information that would be of obvious value to the bounty hunting initiative.

In a November contracting document pertaining to the skip tracing effort, ICE told potential bounty hunting vendors they are “expected to provide their own internal skip tracing tools,” providing contractors with a great deal of latitude to employ surveillance products and techniques of their choosing. The document further noted that private ICE bounty hunters will not be provided credentials to identify them as agents of the government.

404 Media reported Thursday that ICE had also contracted with AI Solutions 87, “a company that makes ‘AI agents’ to rapidly track down targets.”

The post ICE Hires Immigrant Bounty Hunters From Private Prison Company GEO Group appeared first on The Intercept.

Mentions of democracy are noticeably absent, however, from Anduril’s recent announcement of a new joint venture with a state-run bomb maker from an authoritarian monarchy that is facilitating a genocide.

Anduril is partnering with EDGE Group, a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the activities typically associated with democratic societies. In the UAE, free expression and association are outlawed, and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process. A 2024 assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-backed think tank, gave the UAE a score of 18 out of 100.

The EDGE–Anduril Production Alliance, as it will be known, will focus on autonomous weapons systems, including the production of Anduril’s “Omen” drone. The UAE has agreed to purchase the first 50 Omen drones built through the partnership, according to a press release, “the first in a series of autonomous systems envisioned under the joint venture.” The Omen drone was described as a “personal project” of Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey, a longtime Trump ally and fundraiser.

EDGE Chair Faisal Al Bannai explained in a 2019 interview that EDGE was working to develop weapons systems tailored to defeating low-tech “militia-style” militant groups.

The UAE has been eager to sell its weapons around the world, both to generate profit and to exert political influence. This most recently and brutally includes Sudan, where the Emirates supply the Rapid Support Forces, an anti-government militia. Weapons furnished by the UAE have been instrumental in the ongoing civil war, now widely described as having descended into an RSF-perpetrated genocide. In October, video imagery emerged from Sudan showing RSF soldiers indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in Darfur. Reports of rape, torture, and other atrocities at the hands of the RSF are now widespread, and a current “low estimate” of people murdered by the RSF during its recent takeover of the Sudanese city of El Fasher is 60,000, according to a recent report by The Guardian. The Trump administration determined in January that the RSF’s massacres constituted a genocide, echoing assessments by the Biden administration and human rights observers.

The RSF has been able to rapidly overtake the Sudanese army with the help of weapons from Anduril’s new partner. An April investigation by France 24 found EDGE subsidiary International Golden Group funneled tens of thousands of mortar rounds into Sudan for use by the RSF.

Nathaniel Raymonds, who leads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Intercept mortars were among “three weapons systems that went into the hands of RSF that changed the course of the war.”

Raymonds, whose office at Yale previously partnered with the State Department to monitor atrocities in the Sudanese civil war, described Anduril’s joint venture as “mind-boggling” given the role Emirati drones and other weapons have played in facilitating the RSF’s genocide. “You have a DIA and [State Department] assessment that in a just world will trigger Leahy Act and shut this thing down from day one,” Raymonds said, referring to legislation that nominally prohibits the provision of assistance to foreign militaries that have committed major human rights violations.

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Neither Anduril nor EDGE Group responded to a request for comment. A November press release from both companies noted “EDGE and Anduril will work closely with U.S. and UAE authorities to ensure full compliance with applicable laws and regulations including trade compliance rules and regulations.”

A 2024 report by Human Rights Watch noted the use of drone-delivered thermobaric bombs sold by EDGE. In October, The Guardian reported the RSF’s use of armored personnel carriers manufactured by an EDGE subsidiary. In 2024, a United Nations panel of experts deemed the UAE’s backing of the RSF as “credible,” and this year a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers issued a statement criticizing “[f]oreign backers of the RSF and SAF–including the United Arab Emirates.” The Wall Street Journal reported in October that both the State Department’s intelligence office and the Defense Intelligence Agency agreed the UAE was supplying the RSF with a wide array of weapons, vehicles, and ammunition. The UAE has repeatedly denied this support despite ample evidence.

Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who has tracked the flow of arms into Sudan, told The Intercept that EDGE Group’s products have exacerbated the horror of the ongoing war. “The rapid support forces, which we found responsible for crimes against humanity across Sudan, has made widespread use of armored vehicles made by Nimr, a subsidiary of Edge Group,” he said. “The name of Adasi, another subsidiary of Edge Group which specializes in drone technology, appeared on crates of Serbian-made 120mm munitions that the RSF has been using and which equip some of their quadcopter attack drones.” Nan Tian, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, added that the Nimr vehicles are armed with “a gun that is made by KNDS which is a French-German arms maker. KNDS has a military partnership with EDGE Group.”

Raymonds argued that “not since Operation Cyclone,” the CIA effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen, “has there been a covert action by any nation state to arm a paramilitary proxy group at this scale and sophistication and try to write it off as just a series of happy coincidences.”

EDGE was launched at a 2019 inauguration ceremony overseen by Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and consists of over 30 subsidiaries spanning bombs, drones, ammunition, and various military and intelligence software systems. EDGE’s chair of the board, Faisal Al Bannai, is a businessman and adviser to the prince.

EDGE isn’t the only Emirati weapons company, but the conglomerate represents the bulk of the country’s arms industry by volume and illustrates the amorality of its export policy, according to Sam Perlo-Freeman, a researcher with the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, which has advocated for an arms embargo against the UAE. “As a state-owned company, they will be used as an agent of Emirati state policy,” he said. “Arms supplies to allies and proxies across the Middle East, North, and East Africa has been for quite a while a major facet of Emirati state policy.” This has manifested beyond furnishing arms to the RSF, with the UAE arming militaries in Libya, Somalia, and the ongoing genocidal war in Tigray. “There’s very few conflicts in the in the wider region that the UAE haven’t had a hand in, and very often a rather malign hand.”

Reports of EDGE wares winding up in the hands of armed proxies stretches back over a decade.

A 2013 report by the United Nations Security Council found International Golden Group facilitated the import of hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition into Libya in violation of a global arms embargo.

In 2019, a report by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism found UAE-backed combatants in the ongoing Yemeni civil war armed with pistols manufactured by Caracal, an EDGE subsidiary.

As in Sudan, a nominal civil war waged within the Tigray region of Ethiopia was exacerbated by foreign entanglement and a flood of outside weaponry. In 2023, Gerjon’s Aircraft Finds, an aviation analysis Substack, published imagery indicating the import of guided bombs manufactured by Al Tariq, another EDGE subsidiary, for use by the Ethiopian Air Force, responsible for widespread civilian death during the Tigray war.

Anduril, most recently valued by private investors at over $30 billion, has a wide array of weapons in the U.S. and with its allies, including Australia and Taiwan. It works closely with the Department of Defense and has operated surveillance towers along the U.S.–Mexico border for nearly a decade. Its business has surged as it has cast its products as a vital tool in a tech arms race between the West and China, matching the company’s rhetoric positioning it as a lethal bulwark against autocracy.

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Luckey has long cast his company as a defender of democracy. “Soldiers who defend western values should all be superheroes with superpowers,” he tweeted in 2019. In an interview that year, Luckey explained backing democratic allies against “rogue nations” around the world: “I like working with the British,” he said. “Everyone’s a little bit different but more or less we all believe in western values and democracy and universal human rights.”

Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm similarly advanced the company’s moral case for an arms race on human rights grounds, describing China in a 2024 interview as the world’s “greatest evil,” denouncing the Chinese state’s “basic approach to human rights.” Grimm added that “I think they’re conducting an ongoing genocide with their Uyghur population, I think their approach to free speech, to political speech, to religious freedom, are fundamentally antithetical to how the West values human life and how we think about human rights.”

“The fact of Anduril saying they’re an arsenal of democracy and partnering with EDGE Group, it’s obviously ridiculous,” said Perlo-Freeman, “but it’s part of the broader picture of Western democracies treating the UAE as a valued partner and ally and shielding them from consequences.”

The post Anduril Partners With UAE Bomb Maker Accused of Arming Sudan’s Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

As gossip, official leaks, and RUMINT (a portmanteau of rumor and intelligence) about a coming war with Venezuela reign in Washington, Defense Department contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept offer one of the most concrete indications of the Pentagon’s plans for operations in the Caribbean Sea over the next three years.

The contracting documents earmark food supplies for almost every branch of the U.S. military, including the Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. They detail an effort by the Defense Logistics Agency, or DLA, to source “Fresh Bread & Bakery products to Department of Defense (‘DoD’, or ‘Troop’) customers in the Puerto Rico Zone.” One spreadsheet outlining supplies for “Puerto Rico Troops” notes tens of thousands of pounds of baked goods are scheduled for delivery from November 15 of this year to November 11, 2028.

Foodstuff set to feed the troops include individually wrapped honey buns, vanilla cupcakes, sweet rolls, hamburger rolls, and flour tortillas.

The Pentagon has built up a force of 15,000 troops in the Caribbean since the summer — the largest naval flotilla in the Caribbean since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

The surge of combat power comes as the U.S. has conducted more than 20 strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing more than 80 civilians. As part of that effort, the Trump administration has secretly declared that it is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with 24 cartels, gangs, and armed groups including Cártel de los Soles, which the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolas Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Experts and insiders see this as part of a plan for regime change in Venezuela that stretches back to Trump’s first term. Maduro, the president of Venezuela, denies that he heads a cartel.

Mark Cancian, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Intercept that the documents suggest the outsized American military presence in the Caribbean could continue for years.

“The procurement’s length of time and the level of effort seemed to point to these operations continuing at the current level for several years,” said Cancian, who previously worked on defense procurement at the Office of Management and Budget. “That’s significant because it means that the Navy will maintain a large presence in the Caribbean that is far larger than what it has been in recent years. It further implies that the Navy will be involved in these counter-drug operations.”

The Pentagon has tried to keep the details of its military buildup in the region under wraps, failing to answer questions from The Intercept about troop levels, the bulking up of bases, and warships being surged into the Caribbean. “For operational security reasons, we do not release itemized operational details of asset, unit, and troop movements and locations,” said a spokesperson for Southern Command, which oversees military operations in the region. “Information released is published via official communication web sites and social media accounts, or shared with reporters via news releases and updates.”

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The Trump administration has deployed at least 13 warships, five support vessels and a nuclear submarine — including the Ford, which is the largest vessel of its kind — to the region since August. This ramp-up includes three guided-missile destroyers: the USS Jason Dunham, the USS Gravely, and the USS Stockdale. Adm. Alvin Holsey, the outgoing SOUTHCOM commander, recently visited the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima, which has been operating in the Caribbean for months. The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group includes the Iwo Jima; amphibious transport dock ships; and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, a unit especially skilled in amphibious landings.

One DLA document lists as recipients of the food an array of U.S. naval vessels known to be involved in ongoing buildup of troops and vessels including the Iwo Jima, Fort Lauderdale, San Antonio, Jason Dunham, Gravely, and Stockdale, as well as the special operations mothership MV Ocean Trader, which makes periodic appearances at hot spots around the world. The list also mentions the USS Truxtun, a guided missile destroyer not previously reported as part of the Caribbean naval buildup.

As the troops have flooded into the region, the quantities of food and costs listed in the contracting documents have mushroomed.

The initial contracting documents, released in August, included cost estimates and an estimated deliverable quantity of food linked to three locations in Puerto Rico. These were revised in September and October. Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, who analyzed the documents for The Intercept, noted that the final amendment, released on October 9, included a cost estimate that increased 40 percent from the original request. The amount of food, measured in pounds, also skyrocketed 450 percent, she observed. And the number of locations in Puerto Rico jumped from three to 16.

“Those specific ships will be rotated in the months ahead, but they are likely a placeholder for the level of effort,” Cancian added. “As these ships leave, the assumption is that others will replace them. One of the questions we hope the new National Defense Strategy answers is whether this larger Caribbean deployment is long term. This food order seems to imply that it is, though the regional logistical command may just be preparing for a higher level of demand, without being sure whether the new strategy will dictate that.”

Another former defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to his current job with a military contractor, said that the documents raise significant questions that the Defense Department would rather not address. “People will ask whether this means escalation from the strikes on smugglers into a Venezuelan campaign, whatever that eventually looks like,” said the former official who has significant experience in military logistics, procurement, and supply chains.

Other locations in Puerto Rico named in the DLA documents include Muñiz Air National Guard Base within Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport; Fort Buchanan, a U.S. Army installation near San Juan; and Roosevelt Roads naval base. The latter, a Cold War-era facility previously dormant since 2004, is listed as hosting Marines. The base, roughly 500 miles from Venezuela, began receiving Marine Corps aircraft and roughly 4,500 Marines in early November.

A September 4 amendment noted “the Delivery Schedule will include one (1) additional customer. They are as follows: DoDAAC – M20179, Customer – USS Hiroshima.” The Hiroshima is a fictional warship that exists only in the “Star Trek” universe. But Homestead, of the National Priorities Project, pointed out that the Defense Activity Address Code M20179 corresponds with the 22nd MEU, according to a Fiscal Year 2026 Marine Corps logistics document.

Troops from the 22nd MEU are currently conducting training exercises in Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean island nation only miles from Venezuela. Maduro called the drills “irresponsible” and said the neighboring country was “allowing their waters and land to be used to gravely threaten the peace of the Caribbean.” Members of the unit have also conducted reconnaissance and surveillance training at Camp Santiago in Puerto Rico.

For months, the 22nd MEU has failed to respond to The Intercept’s questions about its operations in the region. The unit also did not respond to recent repeated requests for comment about its use of Defense Activity Address Code M20179 and the potential for food deliveries into late 2028 for troops in and around Puerto Rico.

The DLA documents are also no anomaly. Other recent contracting documents detail “food catering services for 22d MEU personnel located at José Aponte de la Torre Airport, Puerto Rico, from 15 September to 31 December 2025.” The Defense Logistics Agency is also looking into a separate “potential six-month contract for full-service food support to visiting U.S. Navy Ships” in Puerto Rico. That deal would include foods from beef steak, chicken cutlets, and lasagna to chocolate pudding, brownie mix, and chocolate chip cookie dough, not to mention breakfast burritos with bacon, egg, and cheese.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the campaign of attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific is called Operation Southern Spear. Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and Southern Command, “this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” he wrote on X. Southern Spear kicked off earlier this year as part of the Navy’s next-generation effort to use small robot interceptor boats and vertical take-off and landing drones to conduct counternarcotics operations.

Trump recently teased the possibility of holding talks with Maduro; Maduro said he is open to face-to-face talks with Trump.

The Pentagon has reportedly presented Trump with various options for attacking Venezuela, according to two government officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose information from classified briefings. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not reply to a request for comment.

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Trump has also publicly spoken of moving the sea attacks to land, confirmed that he secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, threatened future attacks on Venezuelan territory, and said he has not ruled out an invasion of Venezuela by U.S. troops. Asked if the U.S. was going to war against Venezuela, Trump nonetheless replied: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.” But when asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, Trump replied: “I would say yeah. I think so.”

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers did not reply to questions from The Intercept about plans to attack Venezuela, the options for strikes presented to Trump, and the contracting documents which indicate the U.S. will have a major troop presence in the Caribbean into late 2028.

“These documents suggest that the Trump administration plans to maintain a significantly increased military presence in the Caribbean through the remainder of President Trump’s term in office. With ongoing military strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the potential for escalation between the U.S. and Venezuela in particular is high, even if the administration isn’t seeking it,” Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending, told The Intercept.

The post U.S. Military Documents Indicate Plans to Keep Troops in Caribbean Through 2028 appeared first on The Intercept.

This case hinges on a recent effort by the Trump administration to unmask Instagram and Facebook accounts monitoring immigration agents in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. It’s not the first effort of its kind by federal authorities.

In 2017, The Intercept reported an attempt by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to reveal the identity of the operator of a Twitter account critical of President Donald Trump by invoking, without explanation, its legal authority to investigate the collection of tariffs and import duties. Following public outcry and scrutiny from Wyden, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded its legal summons and launched an internal investigation. A subsequent report by the DHS Office of Inspector General found that while CBP had initially claimed it needed the account’s identity to “investigate possible criminal violations by CBP officials, including murder, theft, and corruption,” it had issued its legal demand to Twitter based only on its legal authority for the “ascertainment, collection, and recovery of customs duties.”

The report concluded that CBP’s purpose in issuing the summons to Twitter was unrelated to the importation of merchandise or the assessment and collection of customs duties,” and thus “may have exceeded the scope of its authority.” The OIG proposed a handful of reforms, to which CBP agreed, including a new policy that all summonses be reviewed for “legal sufficiency” and receive a sign-off from CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

Eight years and another Trump term later, CBP is at it again. In October, 404 Media reported that DHS was once again invoking its authority to investigate merchandise imports in a bid to force Meta to disclose the identity of MontCo Community Watch, a Facebook and Instagram account that tracks the actions of immigration authorities north of Philadelphia. A federal judge temporarily blocked Meta from disclosing user data in response to the summons.

In a letter sent Friday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Wyden asked the government to cease what he describes as “manifestly improper use of this customs investigatory authority,” writing that “DHS appears to be abusing this authority to repress First Amendment protected speech.”

The letter refers to the 2017 OIG report, noting that CBP “has a history of improperly using this summons authority to obtain records unrelated to import of merchandise or customs duties. … The Meta Summonses appear to be unrelated to the enforcement of customs laws. On the contrary, DHS apparently is trying to expose an individual’s identity in order to chill criticism of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies.” Wyden concludes with a request to Noem to “rescind these unlawful summonses and to ensure that DHS complies with statutory limitations on the use of 19 U.S.C. § 1509 going forward.”

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The MontCo Community Watch effort followed an earlier attempt this year to unmask another Instagram account that shared First Amendment-protected imagery of ICE agents in public. This subpoena, first reported by The Intercept, focused not on merchandise imports. Instead it invoked law “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States,” even though the subpoena was issued pertaining to “officer safety,” not immigration enforcement.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment

The post Wyden Blasts Kristi Noem for Abusing Subpoena Power to Unmask ICE Watcher appeared first on The Intercept.

Unfortunately for Patel, tracking flights is legal, easy, and an important tool of government transparency.

The location of aircraft within and around the United States is public because the law requires it to be: The Federal Aviation Administration mandates that aircraft must be trackable for safety reasons, namely, to prevent them from crashing into each other all the time. Aircraft, whether privately owned or operating for a major carrier, from a small prop plane to a jumbo jet, are generally required by law to carry a radio transmitter, called a transponder, that continuously broadcasts its GPS coordinates and other information, such as altitude and ground speed. Thanks to what’s known as the Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast, or ADS-B, unencrypted transponder signals are received by other planes in the sky and anyone with a compatible antenna on the ground. According to the FAA, “ADS-B improves safety and efficiency in the air and on runways, reduces costs, and lessens harmful effects on the environment.”

Accessing these broadcast coordinates from the ground is only slightly more complex than tuning in to a local radio station. Entire online communities of aircraft hobbyists, researchers, journalists, and others make use of this open source data to chart the travel of foreign dignitaries, military movements, corporate executive trips, and, now, the director of the FBI.

As vessels of the rich and powerful, the ability to track private flights provides undeniable value to the public: It’s been used to monitor Russian oligarchs, map the CIA’s foreign torture program, and calculate Taylor Swift’s carbon footprint. That this tracking is entirely legal hasn’t stopped the owners of private jets from objecting to the practice. Elon Musk notoriously threatened legal action and banned users from his “free speech” platform X for revealing the movements of his private jet, a practice he described as tantamount to sharing “assassination coordinates.” The use of luxury planes by public servants is a perennial political issue too. In January 2023, two years before he was named as his successor, Patel blasted FBI Director Christopher Wray’s use of the “tax payer funded private jet” based on exactly this same public tracking data.

Patel’s attitude has changed now that he enjoys free use of that jet. In October, Patel’s jet was monitored flying to to State College Regional Airport in Pennsylvania, a brief drive to an arena on the Penn State campus where he and girlfriend Alexis Wilkins were photographed at a Real American Freestyle pro-wrestling event at which Wilkins had performed a song. Flight data then showed the jet headed to Nashville later that evening after the wrestling match, where Wilkins lives, according to her personal website. After facing criticism for using a government plane to see his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a local wrestling event, Patel quickly lashed out in an X post, attacking public scrutiny of the flights and claiming the use of such data is “cowardly and jeopardizes our safety.”

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As FBI director, Patel is required by federal policy to use the jet for personal trips, but Patel is also required to reimburse the DOJ for personal flights. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment or questions posed by The Intercept, including whether Patel has reimbursed the DOJ for personal jet use.

Plane-tracking websites usually draw data from several sources, with many relying heavily on information straight from the FAA. Jet owners can ask the FAA to exclude their transponder data from public trackers, a request many commercial services will honor. For this reason, many plane-watching enthusiasts favor ADS-B Exchange, a free website that crowdsources transponder data collected by thousands of volunteers on the ground and pools it for public consumption. Because it uses crowdsourcing instead of just official FAA data, ADS-B Exchange shows every flight its connected antennae pick up — even if the aircraft’s owners have requested to be delisted. (Although it’s the most comprehensive, certain flights, like military planes that broadcast encrypted coordinates, can remain undetected even by ADS-B Exchange.)

Software engineer and plane tracking enthusiast John Wiseman recommended ADS-B Exchange and Airplanes.live, another service. “They don’t use FAA data, so they’re not bound by FAA rules on what data can be distributed. They also don’t take requests from aircraft owners to anonymize flights,” Wiseman explained.

ADS-B Exchange, with its sprawling, comprehensive map of nearly every plane in the sky, can be overwhelming at first. But tracking Patel’s jet (or any aircraft) is simple. Last year Congress made it more difficult for the public to connect private jets to their owners; establishing the ownership of non-governmental planes can sometimes require serious digging. But the existence of the FBI jet is a matter of public record, and its registration information is publicly available from the FAA’s website. Each plane in the FAA’s system has a unique number: Patel’s is N708JH. The FAA website confirms that N708JH is owned by an entity at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, the address of FBI headquarters. Searching ADS-B Exchange for N708JH will immediately pull up the plane’s current position, if in the air, as well as historical records of past flights. At the time of publication, the jet was last clocked landing at a municipal airport outside of Washington.

Pressing the “Play” button on ADS-B Exchange’s interface will animate a selected historical flight route. It’s possible to dive deeper into the data using filters; appending “?mil=1” at the end of the site’s URL will show only available military flights, for example.

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Anyone can search the FAA website to find other planes of interest; a search for the word “department” reveals dozens of aircraft registered to various federal offices. The website Planespotters.net collects runway photography from around the world, including of N708JH, and can be used to find other aircraft belonging to the Justice Department or other government entities. With a tail number in hand plucked either from FAA or another source, it’s not hard to figure out a plane’s location and travel history.

There are limits to what flight data can reveal. Nothing about the purpose of a flight is disclosed, nor are its passengers. But in conjunction with other open-source information — Wilkins’s Instagram account placed Patel alongside her at Real American Freestyle — it can help fill in the gaps.

The Wall Street Journal recently used flight data from the plane-tracking service FlightRadar24 in a recent report that showed not only had the FBI jet traveled to Nashville coinciding with Wilkins’s wrestling performance, but shortly thereafter also ferried Patel to the Boondoggle Ranch, a Texas hunting resort.

But if the U.S. government, particularly the military, wants to keep a flight hidden badly enough, it will. As the Pentagon launched a string of airstrikes against Iran in June, flight-tracking enthusiasts across the internet latched onto an Air Force refueling plane heading west, toward a base that houses B-2 bombers. Meanwhile, the actual B-2 bombers involved in the strike — which didn’t appear on any tracking portals — were flying in the opposite direction.

Savvy flight-watchers can sometimes get lucky, though, Wiseman explained. ADS-B Exchange also picks up planes broadcasting TIS-B signals, another transponder system. “Many law enforcement and military aircraft only show up on TIS-B. The icons are distinctive, and the [ID codes] are prefixed with ‘~’,” he said. “Sometimes people think those are drones, or fighter jets. They’re almost always just police aircraft, but once in a while, rarely, they are drones or fighter jets.”

Experts suggest new plane trackers chat with other enthusiasts who can share helpful knowledge and context. Discords or other online communities of plane-watchers can help newcomers avoid common errors, like mistaking what might be a typical flight pattern for something unusual or suspect.

Despite Patel’s characterization of plane scrutiny as the work of “clickbait haters” and “uninformed internet anarchists,” plane trackers who spoke to The Intercept all firmly defended the public’s right to know. “Public officials are acting in our name, so we should actively be making sure they’re doing what they claim to be doing and doing so ethically,” Canadian researcher Steffan Watkins, an avid tracker of military and other governmental flights, told The Intercept.

“There’s a strong public interest in knowing how aircraft are being used, and keeping government organizations accountable,” said Wiseman. “It’s good for the public, journalists, and researchers to be able to see how these aircraft are being used, in detail, and how public funds are being spent, in detail. Transparency also deters misuse.”

Wiseman recounted how flight tracking techniques have been used to reveal governmental aerial surveillance of protests: “If it hadn’t been for the persistence of a bunch of nerds obsessed with planes it’s possible the public would have never known.”

Even the DOJ itself has been a fan of ADS-B tracking. In 2016, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said her office had used Dictator Alert, a plane-tracking website that uses ADS-B Exchange data, to aid in criminal seizure investigations.

Watkins rejected concerns — largely by the jet-owning class — that using ADS-B data presents a security risk: “Adversaries, like China, Russia, Iran, etc. already have better ways larger numbers of intelligence professionals tracking these movements, so the public should be as informed as public sources allow.” Wiseman agreed, saying, “There seems to be almost no risk to legitimate operations by making this information public, based on that fact that over the past years that ADS-B has been in wide use and registration information has been generally public we’ve seen very few if any incidents.”

The post How to Track Kash Patel’s Jet appeared first on The Intercept.