The Info Web

#Surveillance

26 entries

People (6)

  • Alex Karp Alex Karp is the cofounder and chief executive of Palantir Technologies, a Stanford-trained social theorist who built the data-analytics firm with Peter Thiel and turned it into a major contractor to U.S. intelligence, the military, and Israel.
  • Amir Elichai Israeli founder and chief executive of Carbyne, formerly Reporty Homeland Security, whose board included Ehud Barak and a former Unit 8200 commander and in which Jeffrey Epstein invested.
  • Ashley Gorski Ashley Gorski is a senior staff attorney in the ACLU's National Security Project who has led the organization's Fourth Amendment litigation against Section 702 backdoor searches, including joining the defense in United States v. Russell.
  • Auren Hoffman Auren Hoffman is an American technology entrepreneur who cofounded the secret society Dialog with Peter Thiel in 2006 and founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, placing him at the intersection of the Thiel elite-network and the consumer-data-brokerage industry.
  • Edward Snowden Edward Snowden (born 1983) was an NSA contractor who disclosed classified mass surveillance programs including PRISM, XKeyscore, and bulk telephone metadata collection to journalists in June 2013, fled to Russia where he received asylum, and was charged under the Espionage Act.
  • Ron Wyden Oregon Democratic senator since 1996 whose Senate Finance Committee staff investigated Leon Black's payments to Jeffrey Epstein and the banks that handled Epstein's money, from 2022 onward.

Organizations (14)

  • ABIN Brazil's central intelligence agency, created by Law 9.883 of December 1999, whose Bolsonaro-era director and sitting leadership were indicted by the Federal Police in 2025 in the Abin paralela espionage inquiry.
  • Anti-Defamation League The Anti-Defamation League is a Jewish civil-rights organization founded in 1913 that was found in a 1993 investigation to have run a private domestic intelligence operation gathering files on thousands of individuals and groups.
  • Audio Intelligence Devices Fort Lauderdale maker of eavesdropping equipment run by the Anguilla adventurer Jack Holcomb, where Michael Townley spent the morning of the Letelier bombing, and which his co-defendants called a CIA front.
  • Carbyne Carbyne, founded as Reporty, is an Israeli emergency-call and surveillance technology company in which Jeffrey Epstein invested through Ehud Barak in 2015, and which Axon Enterprise bought for 625 million dollars.
  • Clearview AI Clearview AI is a facial-recognition company founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, first funded by Peter Thiel before the company was even named, that scraped an estimated thirty billion images from social media and the open web to build a facial-identification database sold to law enforcement, and was the subject of a March 2022 FTC consent order barring it from selling the database to private entities.
  • Dialog Dialog is an invitation-only secret society cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman that convenes U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats, and whose 2026 retreat roster of 222 registrants was leaked to WIRED in June 2026 by the hacktivist maia arson crimew.
  • Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Court of federal district judges designated by the Chief Justice under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to hear government applications for foreign intelligence surveillance orders.
  • Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic San Francisco free clinic founded in 1967 during the Summer of Love that became a nexus for counterculture health services and, through its proximity to CIA-funded psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, a potential node for intelligence community monitoring of the hippie movement.
  • In-Q-Tel Nonprofit venture capital firm created by the CIA in 1999 to buy into technology startups with public money, which has made more than 800 investments, leaves many unannounced, and pays its founding sponsor George Tenet as a trustee.
  • NSO Group NSO Group is an Israeli cyber-intelligence company founded in 2010 by Unit 8200 alumni Omri Lavie, Shalev Hulio, and Niv Karmi, developer of the Pegasus spyware capable of zero-click mobile-phone compromise, whose government clients used the product to surveil over 50,000 targets including Jamal Khashoggi's family, 180 journalists, Catalan independence leaders, and Mexican activists before the July 2021 Pegasus Project exposure.
  • Palantir Technologies Palantir Technologies is a data-analytics and defense contractor cofounded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings with CIA In-Q-Tel seed funding, that supplies data-integration platforms to U.S. intelligence, the Department of Defense, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
  • SafeGraph SafeGraph is a location-data brokerage founded in 2014 by Auren Hoffman that aggregates and resells mobile-device location pings collected from smartphone applications, and whose 2020 contract to supply cell-phone location data to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surfaced the warrantless availability of commercial location data to federal agencies.
  • Stasi The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) was East Germany's combined domestic security and foreign intelligence agency (1950-1990), maintaining approximately 91,000 employees and 189,000 informants and operating the HVA foreign intelligence directorate that penetrated West German government through agents including Günter Guillaume in Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal staff.
  • Worldcoin Worldcoin, rebranded World, is a biometric-identity and cryptocurrency project cofounded by Sam Altman and operated by Tools for Humanity that scans people's irises with a device called the Orb to build a global proof-of-personhood database, and that has been banned or investigated in numerous countries over its data collection.

Programs (1)

  • ECHELON ECHELON was the code name for the global signals intelligence collection and analysis network operated by the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand); its existence was publicly confirmed through European Parliament investigations in the late 1990s, revealing a mass surveillance architecture that intercepted civilian telephone, fax, and data communications worldwide.

Events (1)

  • United States v. Hasbajrami United States v. Hasbajrami is the federal prosecution that produced the first judicial rulings requiring a warrant for Section 702 backdoor searches of Americans' communications, with the Second Circuit's 2019 decision and the district court's 2025 ruling establishing the leading Fourth Amendment framework for FISA database querying.

Concepts (3)

  • FISA Section 702 FISA provision authorizing warrantless collection of foreigners' communications from U.S. providers, whose 'backdoor searches' of Americans' communications courts have held require Fourth Amendment scrutiny.
  • Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Statute of October 25, 1978, requiring court orders from a specially designated panel of federal judges for electronic surveillance inside the United States to obtain foreign intelligence information.
  • Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), enacted April 20, 2024, reauthorized FISA Section 702 through April 20, 2026, codified modest procedural reforms to FBI querying practices, and defeated a bipartisan warrant amendment by a 212-212 tied House vote.

Places (1)

  • Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York The Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York was the Bureau of Prisons pretrial jail at 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan where Jeffrey Epstein died in August 2019, closed in 2021.