Last week, Apple acquired an Israeli A.I. startup called Q.AI, whose tech was designed to analyze facial expressions. The deal, according to the FT, was valued at $2 billion, which would make it Apple’s second-largest acquisition ever—behind its $3 billion acquisition of Beats in 2014. I’m going to give myself partial credit for predicting a few weeks ago that Apple would start acquiring A.I. startups (I was wrong in thinking they’d wait for a market downturn).

Runner-up: SpaceX acquired xAI last night. Space-based data centers, Elon Musk said, are the only way to provide sufficient power for A.I. Another theory, as posited by Ross Gerber: “X was out of money. Merged with xAI. xAI out of money merge with SpaceX. SpaceX out of money. Merge with .... tesla. When they are all out of money....”

And now for the main event…

A few weeks ago, a chilling video surfaced of an exchange between an ICE agent and a woman on a street in Portland, Maine. In the footage, the officer was shown taking photos of a woman who was filming him. When the woman asked what the agent was doing, he replied: “We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.”

It’s not clear which database the agent was referring to, but a survey of government contracts helps illuminate what experts have referred to as Donald Trump’s “American dragnet”—a rapidly expanding surveillance state encompassing facial recognition, cross-agency data integration, biometrics, and yes, a whole lot of artificial intelligence tools. Of course, we want our government to have the most sophisticated technology at their disposal, but matters become more complicated when the administration and its police agencies are pointing their tools inward. For obvious reasons, much of the scrutiny has fallen on Palantir, which has contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the Department of Homeland Security. But the full scope of the department’s work with data brokers reveals a broader and more complex picture.

The surveillance state has expanded under presidents of both parties. In 2022, Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology published a report concluding that ICE was essentially operating as a “domestic surveillance agency,” collecting sensitive data from state and local governments while also purchasing it from private brokers—a practice that Matthew Tokson, a Fourth Amendment scholar, has argued is a constitutional violation. At the time, ICE was using “Department of Motor Vehicle records and utility customer information, as well as call records, child welfare records, credit headers, employment records, geolocation information, health care records, housing records and social media posts,” according to the report. And that was all before July, when the Big Beautiful Bill effectively tripled ICE’s budget.

In August, shortly after the legislation was signed, ICE finalized a $2.1 million contract with GovSmart, an IT and procurement contractor, for software licenses that support “blending multiple ICE data sources, cross-agency sharing, and linking existing reports for analyzing information.” The following month, the agency secured a $1.6 million contract with BlueTech for software licenses that would allow “automation and monitoring of user account management.” ICE also has contracts with TransUnion and Experian, as well as a $106 million contract with CACI NSS for data analysis to support “ongoing criminal investigations.” The agency also works with Booz Allen Hamilton (for data analytics support), Thomson Reuters Special Services (license plate reader data), and the Child Rescue Coalition (for a system that organizes public-facing internet data), to name but a few. (For its part, a TransUnion spokesperson told me that the company “does not provide data to ICE for immigration-related investigations, enforcement or removal operations.” And GovSmart’s C.E.O. told me that it doesn’t have “visibility into, or operational involvement with, ICE enforcement or detainment activities, nor do we provide proprietary technology designed specifically for such purposes.”)

ICE’s partnerships with A.I. companies, however, have truly raised the hackles of civil liberties groups. The agency itself lists use cases for the technology that include autonomous surveillance, automatic data curation and analysis, anomaly detection in the field, and biometrics, among many other functions. The list includes reference to Babel, a third-party data broker that combs social media and other open-source platforms to compile detailed profiles on “travelers who may be subject to further screening.” Alarmingly, the agency’s own A.I. disclosure page argues that it’s too early to assess whether dozens of the listed use cases might infringe privacy rights. (ICE did not return a request for comment on how its technology is evaluated for safety, efficacy, and legality before being deployed.)

I reached out to multiple federal agencies and filed numerous FOIA requests to learn more about how the U.S. government is evaluating these new programs. These requests were either ignored or dismissed. Nevertheless, public filings show that data collection and aggregation are just one piece of the surveillance puzzle. The other piece has to do with identification—specifically, biometrics.

Clearview AI, which has a number of sizable contracts with ICE, is among the more notorious startups partnering with the federal government to provide facial recognition algorithms across a massive pool of “publicly available data.” (Clearview paid $51 million last year to settle a lawsuit accusing it of violating consumer privacy laws.) As The New York Times recently reported, Clearview is among the technology platforms the agency has deployed in Minnesota to track both undocumented immigrants and citizens who have protested ICE’s presence in the state.

But Clearview isn’t the only company providing ICE with biometric technology. The agency also has deals with BI2 Technologies for iris scanning, and recently signed contracts to acquire mobile biometric devices, two of which are with Parsons Government Services. Then there’s Mobile Fortify, an internal app that enables mobile facial recognition by drawing from a number of federal databases. Last month, 404 Media reported on a detained woman whom Mobile Fortify had misidentified—not surprising, given that facial recognition algorithms are known to exhibit biases and are less-than-accurate at best.

Leah Frazier, director of the Digital Justice Initiative at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, told me that there is “very, very little regulation regarding the development of these tools, and so it multiplies the potential civil rights concerns.” For instance, she noted a lack of requirements, especially at the federal level, for developers to test for bias “or to ensure that the technology isn't more error prone for certain groups of people.” The result is that people can get misidentified, which could expose them to unwarranted enforcement actions. “The accuracy issues are front and center,” she said.

The department’s push into A.I., according to Nick Reese, who ran emerging technology at D.H.S. between 2019 and 2023, wasn’t supposed to look like this. In the final weeks of Trump’s first term, the president signed Executive Order 13960, promoting the use of “trustworthy” A.I. in the federal government. “Agencies are encouraged to continue to use A.I., when appropriate, to benefit the American people,” the order read. “The ongoing adoption and acceptance of A.I. will depend significantly on public trust. Agencies must therefore design, develop, acquire, and use A.I. in a manner that fosters public trust and confidence while protecting privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, and American values.”

At around the time that order was signed, D.H.S. published its own A.I. strategy, authored by Reese. This document acknowledged the risks of not only faulty systems and security flaws, but also the potential to impact civil liberties and individual rights. And though both the executive order and the strategy document technically remain in effect, the means to enforce them are gone. The department’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, for instance, did not survive DOGE and Elon Musk’s 2025 governmental purge. The cadre of A.I. governance experts Reese spent several years building has been essentially “liquidated.” More recently, Trump proclaimed a new A.I. action plan that emphasized removing any and all barriers to “American innovation,” a markedly different approach than the one laid out in his 2020 E.O.

Reese described the early days of developing the strategy as filled with challenging conversations around acceptable data use. This involved discussions about how to access certain D.H.S. data while walling off other databases that posed civil rights concerns. “Part of the challenge is that there’s data that is collected not for law enforcement purposes that is now being piped into law enforcement,” he said, in reference to instances where the department is pulling in personal data from the I.R.S., housing agencies, Medicaid, and even your local D.M.V. “That’s asking, ‘Can I?’ not ‘Should I?’ And I think the thing we ultimately were trying to do is put governance in place.” Instead, Reese argued, the second Trump administration pivoted toward a “move fast and break things kind of mentality, which is not something that you can do when you’re dealing with U.S. person data.”

As Biden took office in 2021, Reese and his team were working on drafting a charter for an A.I. Governance Council within D.H.S., with the idea that there would be an accountable official whose job it was to answer the “Should I?” questions of A.I. integration. “We built it. Everything was ready,” he told me. “And we got told it’s not a priority.” As ICE’s enforcement actions continue to ramp up, the lack of governance of the systems it’s using, the lack of transparency around how these systems were built and how they’re being deployed, and an apparent shift in focus away from the trust-building that was at least somewhat prevalent six years ago stand out starkly to Reese today, especially when it all comes coupled with the administration’s relentless push for the federal government to move quickly to integrate A.I.

That’s all for today. I’ll see you on Thursday.

Ian

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