Records show DHS tech incubator spending large sums on partnerships that would expand surveillance capabilities
Hacked data from the Department of Homeland Security’s technology incubator shows it funding a variety of companies that would expand its surveillance capabilities with artificial intelligence, the Guardian can reveal.
The projects at the Office of Industry Partnership (OIP) include automated surveillance in airports; adapters allowing agents to use phones for biometric scanning; and an AI platform that ingests all 911 call data nationally and builds “geospatial heat maps” to “predict incident trends”, which appears to be a form of predictive policing.
The data throws new light on the department’s surveillance ambitions in the wake of the agency’s unprecedented $165bn funding boost in last year’s tax and spending bill, and controversies over agents’ apparent gathering of visual and biometric data on protesters in Minneapolis.
The data was gathered by a pseudonymous “cyber-hacktivist”, and provided to reporters by transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets.
Although some of the data was already publicly available, the leak also exposed more than 6,000 companies that bid with the agency – not all of whom were funded for their projects – offering a window on the full scope of the private sector’s appetite for homeland security work, and the technologies the DHS considered but did not pursue.
Those parts of the data that were already public match the data provided in the leak.
The Guardian emailed the department a detailed request for comment. The Guardian also emailed the hacktivist for comment using an email included with the materials.
Jeramie Scott, a senior counsel and director of the Surveillance Oversight Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said: “It very much feels like sometimes these people are watching dystopian science fiction movies and thinking, ‘Oh, that looks good!’”
He added: “That’s not the lesson from dystopian science fiction. They’re taking the wrong lesson from it.”
The data
The OIP sits within DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, managing programs including the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) initiative, which funnels federal money to small-to-medium enterprises to develop prototypes addressing specific technology needs.
The data as supplied to the Guardian consists of two structured databases: a registry of more than 6,800 companies that have bid with OIP, and a separate database of more than 1,400 funded contracts. Each contract record includes a proposal abstract written by the company, describing the technology it pitched to the DHS.
The SBIR program, mandated by Congress in 1982 and reauthorized in 2022, requires that proposals be evaluated in part on their “potential for commercial application”. The program was designed to ensure that publicly funded R&D produces self-sustaining businesses rather than one-off prototypes.
Contracts typically begin as phase I proof-of-concept awards of around $100,000-$175,000 before graduating to phase II prototype funding of $1m or more. The leaked data spans two decades of this pipeline, from 2004 to late 2025, covering more than 1,400 awarded contracts worth a combined $845m.
Biometrics
Contracts issued since Trump’s inauguration include several focused on enabling agents to harvest biometric data using cellphones.
On 7 May 2025, three contracts were issued for the development of these technologies, and all three promised to make them available beyond DHS.
Idea Mind LLC received $174,464 for a technology it calls Vibe, an adapter that connects fingerprint and iris scanners to phones via USB-C or Lightning, offering “plug-and-play compatibility with Android and iOS devices without requiring custom drivers”.
Intellisense Systems received $174,990 for its similar Flow device designed so that a phone and biometric scanner can be “handheld effectively as a single unit,” supporting “handheld fingerprint (4 slap) and iris peripherals, and face and contactless fingerprint capture using the phone’s camera”. Integrated Biometrics received $167,627 for Bios Link, and wrote that its technology would serve “DHS components, interagency stakeholders, non-federal entities, the intelligence community, and international mission partners”.
Intellisense was spun off from Physical Optics Corporation in 2018. Together the two companies have received 59 DHS research contracts worth more than $17m since 2004, according to the leaked data. Intellisense alone received three contracts on 7 May, including Flow and two other projects involving airport surveillance AI and video deepfake prevention. Like Intellisense, Integrated Biometrics, based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is an established government contractor that manufactures FBI-certified fingerprint sensors and similar devices for law enforcement, military and government clients around the world.
Idea Mind LLC, based in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, had no previous DHS contracting history.
ICE and CBP agents’ harvesting of biometric data and use of facial recognition technologies came into focus during DHS’s January “surge” into the city, after rightwing influencers highlighted longstanding allegations of childcare fraud in the city.
The Guardian contacted all three companies for comment.
Airport surveillance
Four further contracts awarded on 7 May, totaling $699,000, funded technologies for surveilling passengers approaching TSA airport security checkpoints.
All four use AI to analyze existing airport CCTV feeds and automatically catalog passengers’ physical characteristics. Intellisense’s Ossca system would “detect and track individuals; identify anthropometric characteristics, clothing articles, shoe types, and visible accessories” and which agencies can use to “automatically alert operators with flags and detailed reports for adjudication”.
The standalone behavior detection officer role was quietly eliminated in 2016-2017. An ACLU investigation found the program had been used for racial profiling at airports including Newark and Chicago.
DHS’s own earlier attempt at technology-assisted behavioral screening, the Fast program was quietly wound down in the wake of EPIC’s disclosures.
On Fast and its apparent successors, Scott, the EPIC counsel, said “not only is it highly unlikely to work, but there are issues in terms of the risk it creates, in its disproportionate impacts, in turning the state apparatus on people who haven’t done anything wrong, in the waste of money, and in the potential for those tools to be used to undermine democracy.”
Predictive Policing
Also on 7 May, three contracts totaling $524,000 were awarded for AI platforms that would ingest 911 call data, with one apparently promising to identify and predict crime patterns.
All three were awarded under the same DHS topic seeking tools to centralise and analyse data from the nation’s 5,000-plus 911 call centres.
The most far-reaching is Cimas, the Consolidated Incident Management Analytics System, built by a newly-registered firm, Cassius LLC.
Its proposal describes “a high-availability data lake integrated with AI-driven analytics” that would collect and anonymise 911 call and incident data from public safety answering points nationwide, generating “geospatial heat maps” and using AI models to “predict incident trends” and “deliver actionable insights to responders.”
Cassius LLC, based in Bangor, Maine has no previous DHS contracting history. Cassius’s website describes it as a utility IT consulting firm; it names no team members, and its “our team” page is non-functional.
The Brennan Center for Justice has described predictive policing as “tech-washing” that “gives racially biased policing methods the appearance of objectivity, simply because a computer or an algorithm seems to replace human judgment.” Leading police departments including Los Angeles and Chicago abandoned their predictive policing programs in 2019-20.
The Guardian emailed Cassius and Zachary Canders, listed as the firm’s partner in DHS documents and Maine company filings for further clarification of the proposed technology.
In an email response, Canders wrote to The Guardian: “Hey, that’s really great” adding: “Could you do me a favor? Let’s write a story about me taking your mom out to dinner. We have an amazing seafood buffet. Lots of laughs lots of hugs probably a few kisses, then I never call her back.”[SOURCE]
It’s difficult to catalog the range of visceral emotions I feel as I watch President Trump, Elon Musk, and his team of whiz kids at DOGE dismantle the Deep State, piece by piece. Anger. Joy. Disgust. Grim satisfaction. Schadenfreude.
We’ve known for years that our federal government has been robbing us blind. We’ve felt it in our bones but been unable to prove it, while those who gorge themselves at the public trough — politicians, contractors, media figures, lobbyists, lawyers, NGO execs — become rich beyond most of our wildest dreams. To see all that graft and corruption finally dragged into the light of day, with receipts, is almost more than I can process.
As I write, when I find it hard to express my thoughts, I often turn to narrative. So let me start with a little story, a true story, one I’ve thought of many times in the past two weeks.
Last summer, my wife accompanied me to the Washington, D.C. area, where I was helping conduct a three-day workshop for a group of conservative college kids sponsored by The Leadership Institute. She often comes with me on these trips, now that we’re empty-nesters, especially if I’m going someplace interesting or somewhere she’s never been. Usually my expenses are paid, and all we have to do is buy an extra plane ticket. And since D.C. has always been one of her favorite places to visit, as an ardent American history buff, she was happy to tag along and see some of the sights while I worked during the day and with me at night.
One fine evening, after a rain shower had cooled things down, we decided to go for a walk in the obviously rather affluent neighborhood right behind our upscale hotel in Arlington. Lining the quiet, tree-canopied streets were quite a few stately older homes, several smaller older homes, and whole slew of large, modern, brand-new homes, some still under construction.
Out of curiosity, my wife pulled up Zillow on her phone and began looking at home prices, using the function that allows you to see the estimated value of every house in the vicinity all at once. I heard her exclaim, “Oh, my gosh” and looked over her shoulder at the app. Even the oldest, most run down house on the block was valued at over $1.5 million. The larger ones were in the $2–3 million range, with the new homes pushing $4 million.
“Where do all these people get that kind of money?” she asked.
“From us,” I replied.
I understand that’s a bit of a generalization. Some of those homes have been owned by the same people for years and simply appreciated in value. Then again, you can see on Zillow when a home has been sold, and most of the ones we were looking at had changed hands at least once within the last five years.
I also understand that not everyone in D.C. makes his money directly from the federal government. Indeed, most federal employees can’t afford to live in a neighborhood like that, which is why they live far from downtown and commute an hour or more to work. (Back when they used to commute, I mean, before they all started working from home — something else Trump is putting an end to.)
And yes, it’s true that other metro areas, like San Francisco and Chicago, are also very expensive, because they have lucrative industries that draw people to them. In the Bay Area, for example, you have Big Tech, which seems to be creating new millionaires every day. People who are interested in the technology field, and who want to make a lot of money, are drawn to the area.
That’s not to say everyone in the Bay Area works in the tech industry, or that everyone who lives there is rich. It’s just that the tech sector is the main driver of the area’s economy and the main reason so many rich people live there. If the tech companies all went away, the economy in the Bay Area would collapse overnight. (That very thing may be starting to happen.)
So what about Washington, D.C., which is nearly as affluent and expensive as San Francisco, if not more so? What is the main industry there? What is the driver of its economy?
You know the answer. It’s the federal government. That’s what draws people to D.C. Not the climate or the food or the history. People looking to make lots of money are drawn there by Big Gov, with its virtually limitless funds. And what is the source of those funds? Why, we are. We the people, the taxpayers of the United States of America. Under our Constitution, the government is essentially us.
Here’s where the schadenfreude comes in.
My wife and I have worked hard all our lives to achieve some level of success. We make a decent living. We’ve lived frugally. We sacrificed to put four kids through college. We haven’t taken on a ton of consumer debt, and we pay our bills on time. We’ve saved and invested.
Now I look at my portfolio and, factoring in the last four years of inflation, I calculate that I may need to work until I’m 72 or older just so we don’t run out of money in retirement. On one level, this is fine. I enjoy what I do, and I’m not actually looking to retire anytime soon. Nor am I complaining about the hard work. I was raised to expect life to be like that. We brought up our children the same way.
But then I stroll through a neighborhood like that one, in (or very near) our nation’s capital, and I see all these people who are making their money — most of them, anyway, directly or indirectly — from the federal government, the government I pay taxes for, and they’re ten times richer than I’ll ever be.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow — that any amount of my hard earned money, however small, goes toward enabling someone else to buy a $4-million home, a home I could never afford if I work until I’m 102.
Then Elon and his wunderkinds come along and show us that we were right all along, that we are being robbed, that the treasury is being plundered, that money — our money — is being funneled to people and places we would never approve, into worthless projects that, besides flouting our values, are mostly just money-laundering schemes to help the rich men north of Richmond get even richer.
And then Elon and company begin to turn off the spigot. Suddenly, the trough is no longer filling up. And the Deep State operators and all their cronies and minions panic. They’re being starved. What will they do? What will happen to the value of all those multi-million-dollar homes they’ve purchased with our money?
Hey, maybe in a couple of years I will be able to afford one of those after all.
Image via Pixabay.
A group of “Covid cautious” people In Oregon rented out a bowling alley, had everyone mask including the employees, set up air purifiers, and separated kids from adults.
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 26, 2024
This happened a few days ago.
How are these people real pic.twitter.com/9219aWEKSn
On Sept. 9, 2013, Hillary Clinton returned to the Obama White House for the first time since leaving her job as secretary of state seven months earlier. Still undecided about a presidential bid, Clinton kept her profile low. But the occasion — a White House summit on animal trafficking — seemed to promise a photo-op with zero political risk.
Instead, Clinton walked into a national security crisis and found herself huddling in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama about an issue that haunts them both to this day, and which Donald Trump invoked in Sunday night’s presidential debate as evidence of Clinton’s poor judgment.
The issue was Obama’s chemical weapons “red line” in Syria, an ultimatum that led Obama to threaten the use of force against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad before ultimately accepting a peaceful resolution. Although Obama defends the outcome, critics in both parties — including three former Obama defense secretaries — accuse him of dangerous indecision and lack of resolve. Trump has called the episode a national “humiliation.”
Trump told the debate audience that the episode “was laughed at all over the world, what happened,” and he sought to pin it directly on Clinton.
“She was there as secretary of state with the so-called line in the sand,” the Republican nominee said, in an apparent reference to what is usually called Obama’s “red line.”
“No, I wasn’t. I was gone,” Clinton protested. “At some point we need to get the facts out.”
But the facts are less convenient than either Clinton or Trump suggested.
Although she was a private citizen at the time, Clinton did play a supporting role in the red-line saga. As it unfolded in late August and early September 2013, she had several conversations with Obama and his top aides and with Secretary of State John Kerry. She issued several public statements supporting Obama, including unplanned remarks on the day of her White House visit.
In doing so, Clinton put her stamp on one of the most consequential episodes of Obama’s presidency, one she has sometimes defended — and at other times tried to distance herself from, as she did on Sunday night.
Trump’s own position is not simple, either. Though he now ridicules Obama’s aborted military action, at the time he urged Obama in a tweet not to follow through on his threat to bomb Syria. He did so even after many observers argued that American credibility was on the line, a view Trump now appears to endorse. But Trump also argued that Obama never should have issued his red-line ultimatum in the first place.
But it was Clinton who had the direct role in the saga.
When she arrived at the White House on Sept. 9, she found Obama’s national security team scrambling.
Two weeks earlier, Obama had threatened airstrikes against Syrian government forces to punish them for using chemical weapons — a violation of a rhetorical “red line” Obama had drawn months earlier.
Obama was wary of entanglement in Syria. Hours before Clinton’s arrival, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave him an escape hatch. Putin offered to force his ally, Assad, to surrender his chemical arsenal if Obama promised not to bomb.
Clinton had not spoken publicly on the subject since Obama’s initial threat, drawing snarky jibes for a two-week silence on Twitter — though she had already been advising Obama and his aides behind the scenes. Now she found herself meeting with Obama in the Oval Office, huddling with top White House officials, and hastily revising her planned remarks before the media to include a public statement on the Russian offer, in which she called Putin’s plan “an important step.”
Obama accepted the Russian proposal a few days later; there would be no U.S. airstrikes. But Obama traded a military conflict for a political one. On the right, the phrase “red line” has become mocking shorthand for weakness and indecision.
Clinton has mostly defended Obama’s performance, backing him at key points as the drama unfolded and declaring its outcome a “net positive.” Since she began running for president, however, Clinton has conceded that the episode left U.S. allies uncertain about American resolve.
“I do think that not being able to follow through with it cost us. I’m certain of that,” Clinton said in a September 2015 event in Washington, D.C.
Lately, Clinton and her aides have preferred to avoid the subject altogether. In a January debate, Clinton refused to say whether she thought the saga had harmed America’s credibility. And during a Sept. 21 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, also dodged the question, saying the decision “was made after she was out of office” and refusing to characterize Clinton’s view. Her campaign did not provide a comment for this story.
The subject puts Clinton in an uncomfortable spot, caught between one of Obama’s most criticized foreign policy decisions and her close embrace of a president beloved by Democratic voters whose support she needs in November.
Trump has eagerly exploited the awkwardness. In a Sept. 7 news release, his campaign said Clinton “strongly backed” Obama’s red line and that she “backed measures that fell far short of the steps that needed to be taken to swiftly resolve the situation.”
“According to experts, this vacuum of American influence directly led to the rise of ISIS,” the release added.
Many experts would dispute that. Trump’s release also did not specify what “steps” should have been taken.
Trump also neglects to mention his own evolving view. In a Sept. 7, 2013, tweet, he urged Obama not to follow through on his threatened attack: “President Obama, do not attack Syria. There is no upside and tremendous downside,” Trump wrote.
Obama’s comment surprised some White House officials who worried about its implications. But four months later, in December 2012, Clinton doubled down on it. “We have made our views very clear. This is a red line for the United States,” she said. Clinton said she wouldn’t “telegraph in any specifics what we would do … but suffice to say we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur.”
Clinton left the State Department in February 2013. That August, Assad’s forces fired nerve gas into a Damascus suburb, killing a U.S.-estimated 1,429 people, including more than 400 children.
Obama couldn’t ignore it. “There need to be international consequences,” he said on Aug. 28, vowing two days later to take “limited, narrow” military action. Pentagon planners drew up targets and moved warships. On Sept. 3, Kerry laid out the case for action. “It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something,” Kerry said.
Clinton watched the drama in cautious silence at first. She’d been burned by her support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and knew the public had little appetite for a new military intervention in the Arab world. “Parallels were drawn with the run-up to the war in Iraq,” she recalls in her 2014 book “Hard Choices.”
But the absence from the all-consuming debate of Clinton — the presumed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee — quickly grew conspicuous.
“Hillary has no right to remain silent,” former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted on Sept. 3. BuzzFeed mocked Clinton when she finally broke a two-week Twitter hiatus not to comment on Syria but to congratulate a woman who swam from Cuba to Florida.
The plot took an abrupt twist on Aug. 31, when Obama startled the world — including many of his own advisers — by announcing he would ask Congress to authorize a strike beforehand. Critics said Obama was losing his nerve and passing the buck for his own red line.
But Clinton came to his defense. “Secretary Clinton supports the president’s effort to enlist the Congress in pursuing a strong and targeted response to the Assad regime’s horrific use of chemical weapons,” a Clinton aide told reporters on Sept. 3.
Now Clinton was drawn into the unfolding drama. In the following days she spoke multiple times with both Kerry and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, offering them political and diplomatic advice. She urged McDonough to enlist the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, to push through a quick bipartisan vote in his committee authorizing the use of force against Syria — a move she felt would give Kerry and Obama leverage before an upcoming meeting with Putin. Clinton even lobbied other senators, including New York Democrat Charles Schumer, to back the controversial measure.
The White House more than welcomed Clinton’s advice. At one point in early September, according to Clinton’s book, McDonough told Clinton that the president wanted to call her again. Clinton demurred, saying that Obama must be too busy. He phoned her anyway.
By then Obama was losing control of the situation. On Aug. 30, Britain’s Parliament unexpectedly voted against military action. Support in the U.S. Congress began to look perilously weak.
Trump, meanwhile, tweeted almost daily as the crisis played out, repeatedly imploring Obama not to strike Syria. “What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long term conflict? Obama needs Congressional approval,” Trump tweeted on Aug. 29, 2013.
But Trump also condemned Obama for having drawn the red line in the first place. “The only reason President Obama wants to attack Syria is to save face over his very dumb RED LINE statement. Do NOT attack Syria, fix U.S.A.,” he tweeted several days later.
The Trump campaign declined to comment.
Then, on Sept. 9, Clinton arrived at the West Wing for the summit on animal trafficking, joined by her daughter, Chelsea, who had made the issue a high-profile cause for the Clinton Foundation. By then, the plot had thickened further in the form of the Russian offer to force Assad to relinquish his chemical weapons if the U.S. agreed not to bomb. (Putin strongly opposed U.S military action against his Syrian ally.)
Soon after her 1 p.m. arrival, Clinton was briefed on the latest developments, then ushered into an Oval Office meeting with Obama. With Congress poised to deal him an embarrassing defeat, she advised that he accept the Russian plan. “I told the President that if the votes for action against Syria were not winnable in Congress he should make lemonade out of lemons and welcome the unexpected overture from Moscow,” she recounts in “Hard Choices.” Clinton told Obama she was wary of a possible Russian stalling tactic, and understood that the deal would do little to resolve the larger Syrian crisis — but that it was still worth trying. Obama, in need of political cover, asked her to make a public statement to that effect.
After huddling with Obama’s national security speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, Clinton appeared before a press corps that had been expecting to hear her views on elephant poaching. Reading from a new introduction to her planned remarks, Clinton said that “it would be an important step” if Syrian leader Assad surrendered his chemical stockpile, one possible thanks only to a “credible military threat” by the U.S.
A few days later, Obama formally agreed to the Russian proposal and halted Pentagon planning for airstrikes. Some key U.S. allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, were appalled, saying Obama had sent a dangerous signal of weakness to adversaries like Iran. In the months to come, three Obama defense secretaries — Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and Chuck Hagel — would say he mishandled the situation. “The credibility of the United States is on the line,” Panetta told Yahoo News in October 2014. “It was important for us to stand by our word and go in and do what a commander in chief should do.”
“If you cock that pistol,” Gates told Business Insider in January 2016, “you have to be ready to fire it.”
“I wouldn’t have drawn the line, but once he drew it, he had no choice but to go across,” Trump argued during a Republican primary debate in September 2015. “Somehow, [Obama] just doesn’t have courage. There is something missing from our president. Had he crossed the line and really gone in with force, done something to Assad, if he had gone in with tremendous force, you wouldn’t have millions of people displaced all over the world.”
Obama’s backers call that ridiculous and contend that the final outcome was a clear success. Defying skeptics, international inspectors removed 1,300 tons of chemical weapons from Syria — some from sites now controlled by the Islamic State.
“We ended up getting rid of a weapons-of-mass-destruction threat that was worse than what the CIA wrongly estimated was in Iraq, for which we went to war. Why is that considered a failure?” said Derek Chollet, a former senior Obama Pentagon official who advises Clinton’s campaign. (Recent evidence has emerged suggesting that Assad may have hidden some of his arsenal. The U.S. also believes that the Syrian regime has since attacked civilians with chlorine gas, a substance not covered by the 2013 agreement.)
Clinton’s instincts are more hawkish than Obama’s, and since joining the presidential race she has repeatedly said she would take stronger action in Syria than Obama has. She cites her support for a 2012 plan to arm Syria’s rebels, which Obama rejected, and says she would consider imposing a “no fly” zone in northern Syria.
Yet when it comes to Obama’s “red line,” Clinton has never directly criticized him. In a September 2015 discussion about military force with The Des Moines Register editorial board, however, Clinton did argue generally that, “If we say we’re going to do something publicly,” a president must explain “why we have to go through with doing it ... so that we don’t raise expectations and cause miscalculations.”
She did not link Obama or Syria directly to that comment. And, when asked specifically about the red-line saga during a Jan. 17 Democratic primary debate, Clinton defended Obama, calling the agreement with Russia “a very positive outcome.”
“We were able to get the chemical weapons out. Getting those chemical weapons out was a big, big deal,” she said.
The debate moderator, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, then followed up by asking again whether the episode had damaged American credibility abroad. Clinton would not take the bait. “I think as commander in chief, you have to be constantly evaluating the decisions you have to make,” Clinton said.
Then she quickly changed the subject.[SOURCE]
