Fayette County, Georgia becomes first US jurisdiction to deploy Carbyne 911 surveillance system

Fayette County, Georgia approved a $192,000 expenditure to become the first 911 system in the United States to deploy Carbyne’s IP-based emergency communication platform with comprehensive surveillance capabilities. After piloting the system from August through December 2017, Fayette County went live with Carbyne’s technology, which extracts device location data, enables live video streaming from caller smartphones to 911 call centers, monitors text messages through two-way chat windows, and can access data from users’ phones even without the Carbyne app installed when they contact 911 centers running the software.

The deployment occurred just months before Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund invested $15 million in Carbyne in August 2018, marking the first US municipal adoption of technology developed by Unit 8200 veterans and funded by Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak. During the approval process, county commissioners raised concerns about data privacy, specifically questioning whether information collected by the system would be sold or released to third parties. The company’s leadership at deployment included former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak as chairman, former Unit 8200 commander Pinchas Buchris on the board, and co-founder Lital Leshem, who simultaneously served as executive director of Erik Prince’s Frontier Resource Group.

Privacy advocates raised significant concerns about Carbyne’s data extraction capabilities combined with the company’s extensive ties to Israeli military intelligence (Unit 8200), US intelligence contractors (Peter Thiel’s Palantir), and private military intelligence operations (Erik Prince’s organizations). The technology’s ability to access comprehensive smartphone data during emergency calls, justified for public safety purposes but operated by a company with documented connections to multiple intelligence services and international business interests spanning Israel, UAE, China, and the United States, raised fundamental questions about data sovereignty, accountability, and the potential use of emergency response infrastructure for intelligence gathering beyond stated public safety missions. The Fayette County deployment established the template for Carbyne’s expansion across dozens of US jurisdictions serving over 250 million people.