The Intercept published an investigation on January 10, 2019 revealing that beginning in 2016, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team with virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service containing every video created by every Ring camera …
On September 26, 2018, Gizmodo published a leaked 45-minute union-busting training video that Amazon had distributed to Whole Foods team leaders, exposing the company’s systematic program to identify …
On July 26, 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released results of an independently verified test demonstrating that Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with mugshots from a database of arrest photos. The test, which cost …
The Internal Revenue Service announces a Virtual Currency Compliance Campaign to address tax noncompliance related to cryptocurrency use, heavily relying on Chainalysis blockchain surveillance software. The IRS Cyber Crimes Unit (CCU), a five-year-old division of IRS Criminal Investigation, deploys …
In June 2018, at the height of the Trump administration’s family separation crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, Amazon Web Services officials met with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) representatives in Redwood City, California to pitch Rekognition facial recognition technology for …
Ring launched its standalone Neighbors app on iOS and Android devices, marking its first major product release since Amazon’s acquisition two months earlier. The free app allows users to share photos and videos of alleged suspicious activity, creating a crowdsourced surveillance network …
On May 4, 2018, Axon Enterprise acquired VieVu LLC, its primary competitor in the police body camera industry, for $7.1 million ($4.6 million cash and $2.5 million in stock) plus performance-based milestone payments of 141,000 additional shares. The acquisition eliminated meaningful competition in …
Esteban Castano and Rahul Raina found TRM Labs in San Francisco, creating a blockchain intelligence platform designed to help government agencies, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency businesses detect and investigate crypto-related fraud and financial crime. The company enters a rapidly …
Amazon announced its acquisition of Ring, a maker of smart doorbell cameras and home security systems, in a deal Reuters reported cost over $1 billion. The acquisition marked one of Amazon’s largest purchases and represented a major expansion into home surveillance infrastructure. Ring, …
Grayshift rapidly expands its federal law enforcement customer base, securing significant contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), along with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Secret …
Garrett Langley founds Flock Safety in Atlanta and presents at Y Combinator Demo Day in Mountain View. The company initially targets homeowners associations and neighborhoods with automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras, charging $25-50 per home annually to create surveillance networks …
Anduril Industries was incorporated on June 16, 2017, by Palmer Luckey (Oculus VR founder), Trae Stephens (Founders Fund partner and former Palantir executive), Matt Grimm, Joe Chen, and Brian Schimpf (CEO). The company was seeded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and pitched low-cost border …
On April 7, 2017, TASER International announced its rebrand to Axon Enterprise, signaling a strategic pivot from weapons manufacturer to comprehensive police technology platform provider. The name change reflected the company’s evolution toward cloud-based evidence management and AI-powered …
A hacker successfully breaches one of Cellebrite’s servers and steals approximately 900 GB of sensitive data, which is then provided to Motherboard. The stolen cache includes customer usernames and passwords for accessing Cellebrite’s my.cellebrite domain used by customers to download …
Amazon Web Services announced the launch of Amazon Rekognition at its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas on November 30, 2016. The cloud-based facial recognition service marked Amazon’s entry into surveillance technology, offering image and video analysis capabilities including face …
The ACLU of Northern California released a report revealing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram had provided special data access to Geofeedia, a surveillance technology company that marketed its location-based monitoring tools to law enforcement agencies for tracking Black Lives Matter protesters …
Twitter exercised its contractual veto power to block U.S. intelligence agencies from accessing Dataminr’s social media surveillance platform, marking a rare instance of a tech company refusing to facilitate government intelligence gathering. The decision came as Dataminr was conducting an …
The FBI engages Israeli mobile forensics company Cellebrite to crack the iPhone 5C used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, after Apple refuses to create software to bypass the device’s security features. Following the December 2015 terrorist attack that killed 14 people, the FBI …
Grayshift is founded in Atlanta, Georgia by David Miles, Braden Thomas, Justin Fisher, and Sean Larsson, directly motivated by the FBI’s difficulties extracting data from the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. The company develops GrayKey, a small gray box measuring four inches by four …
Chainalysis secures its first federal government contract, a $9,000 data software deal with the FBI, marking the beginning of the U.S. government’s systematic use of blockchain surveillance technology. In 2015, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service are Chainalysis’s only federal …
ShotSpotter’s acoustic gunshot detection system undergoes major expansion across the United States during 2015, with significant deployments in New York City and Sacramento representing the technology’s growing adoption by major metropolitan police departments.
In August 2015, the New …
PredPol’s predictive policing software reaches widespread adoption across the United States, with almost 60 police departments using the technology by early 2015. Major cities including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and numerous smaller jurisdictions have implemented the algorithmic crime prediction …
Michael Gronager, Jonathan Levin, and Jan Møller found Chainalysis in late 2014, creating the first startup dedicated to Bitcoin tracing for government agencies and financial institutions. The company emerges from Gronager’s work investigating the Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange collapse, …
The United States Supreme Court unanimously rules in Riley v. California that police generally may not, without a warrant, search digital information on a cell phone seized from an individual who has been arrested. Chief Justice John Roberts writes the landmark opinion, declaring that “cell …
Oracle Corporation acquired BlueKai, one of the world’s largest data brokerage and web tracking companies, on February 24, 2014, for approximately $400 million, significantly expanding Oracle’s commercial surveillance capabilities. The acquisition gave Oracle control of one of the …
The Chicago Police Department launches the Strategic Subject List (SSL), colloquially known as the “heat list,” a predictive policing mechanism designed to identify individuals most likely to be involved in gun violence either as perpetrators or victims. The program’s public debut …
The Obama administration prosecuted eight individuals under the Espionage Act for leaking to media, more than all previous administrations combined which had only three cases total since 1917. Those prosecuted included Thomas Drake (NSA) whose 10 felony charges were reduced to a misdemeanor after …
Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s PRISM program gave the government direct access to servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, and other tech giants, collecting emails, photos, videos, and communications of millions of Americans. Companies initially resisted but capitulated under …
Elliptic is founded in London by Adam Joyce, Tom Robinson, and James Smith, becoming the first company to develop cryptoasset anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance tools based on blockchain analytics. The company pioneers the application of blockchain forensics to track illicit …
The New Orleans Police Department launches a secretive predictive policing program in partnership with Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The program operates without public knowledge or oversight, escaping scrutiny …
PredPol, a predictive policing software company, is founded in Santa Cruz, California by UCLA Professor of Anthropology Jeff Brantingham and mathematician George Mohler. The company emerges from research begun in 2010 when Brantingham recruited UCLA mathematicians to develop algorithms for …
Beginning around 2012, Amazon deployed comprehensive automated surveillance systems in its warehouses that tracked worker productivity per second through handheld scanners, creating what labor advocates described as algorithmic …
The Los Angeles Police Department launches Operation LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration), a controversial predictive policing program that runs from 2011 to 2019. The program is designed to identify and target individuals deemed at high risk of committing violent crimes using a …
FBI field offices around the country began surveilling Occupy Wall Street organizers as early as August 2011—a month before the first protesters arrived at Zuccotti Park—treating the nonviolent economic justice movement as a potential terrorist threat despite acknowledging internally that organizers …
Geofeedia was founded in Chicago by Phil Harris, Mike Mulroy, and Scott Mitchell to provide location-based social media monitoring software. The platform used algorithms to isolate publicly available geotagging data from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other social channels, …
FBI agents executed coordinated early-morning raids on the homes and offices of anti-war and international solidarity activists in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities, seizing computers, phones, documents, and political materials. The raids targeted activists organizing against the Iraq and …
Former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake was indicted on ten felony counts, including five under the Espionage Act of 1917, marking the Obama administration’s aggressive prosecution of national security whistleblowers. Drake faced up to 35 years in prison for allegedly retaining classified …
Dataminr was founded in New York City by Yale University graduates Ted Bailey, Sam Hendel, and Jeff Kinsey to provide real-time monitoring and analysis of social media data streams. The company secured a direct licensing agreement with Twitter to purchase the platform’s complete …
By 2008, the Bush administration had privatized 70% of the intelligence budget to private contractors, creating a ‘shadow intelligence community’ with unprecedented corporate access to classified information. Associate DNI Ronald Sanders confirmed that 37,000 ‘core’ …
Between September 2008 and October 2009, Sprint Nextel disclosed GPS location data for wireless subscribers over 8 million times via a specialized secure government portal, illustrating the extensive telecommunications surveillance capabilities during this period.
In 2007, Verizon was deeply involved in NSA surveillance programs, participating in classified intelligence collection efforts during the Bush Administration, demonstrating the close relationship between telecommunications companies and national security agencies.
Cellebrite establishes its Mobile Forensics Division and introduces the first version of the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), a portable tool capable of extracting both physical and logical data from mobile phones, including deleted data and encrypted or password-protected information. …
The FBI ordered informant Craig Monteilh to infiltrate multiple large mosques in Orange County, California, in a dragnet surveillance operation that targeted entire Muslim communities rather than specific suspects. The operation exemplified the FBI’s post-9/11 practice of religious profiling …
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a groundbreaking front-page New York Times article revealing the NSA had been conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans since 2001 under President Bush’s secret authorization. The story exposed that the NSA, traditionally focused on foreign …
Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card went to George Washington Hospital ICU to pressure hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft to reauthorize the NSA surveillance program that the Department of Justice had deemed illegal. Acting Attorney General James Comey raced to the hospital with …
Accenture, leading the Smart Border Alliance, was awarded a major Department of Homeland Security contract to develop a comprehensive border management technology system. The five-year contract, valued between $10 million and $10 billion, aimed to create a ‘virtual border’ system using …
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 …
During the Bush administration, AT&T began extensive collaboration with the NSA, involving the installation of surveillance infrastructure across multiple internet hubs. While the precise $500 million contract could not be fully verified, documents confirm significant financial investments in …
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 …
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, …