On September 25, 2025, Microsoft President Brad Smith announced the unprecedented decision to “cease and disable” cloud computing and AI services to Israel’s Unit 8200 military intelligence unit, marking the first time a major U.S. technology company terminated service to the …
Flock Safety’s automated license plate recognition network reaches unprecedented scale, with more than 5,000 law enforcement departments across the United States using interconnected cameras that perform over 20 billion scans of vehicles every month. The company now operates in more than 5,000 …
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The Guardian, citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revealed that the National Security Agency was collecting almost 200 million text messages per day from around the world through a program codenamed DISHFIRE. According to the leaked documents from 2011, the program collected “pretty …
The Washington Post and The Guardian simultaneously published explosive revelations about PRISM, a classified program allowing the National Security Agency and FBI to tap directly into the central servers of nine major U.S. internet companies to extract audio, video, photographs, emails, documents, …
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Glenn Greenwald published the first article in The Guardian based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revealing a top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) order requiring Verizon to hand over all telephone metadata to the National Security Agency on an “ongoing, daily …
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NSA intelligence analyst Russell Tice contacts the Senate Intelligence Committee and journalists to report illegal domestic surveillance programs targeting American citizens without warrants. Tice revealed that NSA was conducting mass surveillance of Americans’ communications under programs …
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Congress passes the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for 2004 (H.R. 2658), containing language that permanently terminates funding for the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program and orders the immediate closure of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office. The Senate had voted …
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Palantir Technologies was officially incorporated in May 2003 by Peter Thiel and PayPal alumni, just months after Congress defunded DARPA’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program due to privacy concerns. The founders met with John Poindexter, the recently fired director of Total Information …
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The New York Times publishes an investigative piece by John Markoff exposing the full scope of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a $240 million initiative that aims to create unprecedented mass surveillance capabilities by mining personal data from financial …
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At the DARPATech 2002 Conference in Anaheim, California, Rear Admiral John Poindexter publicly unveils the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, describing it as a comprehensive surveillance system to detect terrorists by monitoring ’transaction spaces’ including financial records, …
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In September 2001, AT&T established a secret partnership with the NSA to provide direct access to its internet backbone infrastructure, creating unprecedented mass surveillance capabilities that bypass traditional legal protections. This infrastructure enabled the systematic collection and …
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