Decensored News reports: “Thousands of U.S. law enforcement officers from around the country — including high-ranking officials — have traveled to Israel since the early 2000s to receive training from Israeli police and military personnel. See clips from a longer piece published by AJ+ in 2020.
SOPHIA GOODFRIEND, [email protected]
Goodfriend is Harry Frank Guggenheim research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Pembroke College and a non-resident fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.
She wrote the piece “U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home” for The Intercept which states: “Silicon Valley firms supplied the software and computing infrastructure that enabled Trump’s policies. Companies like Babel and Palantir entered into contracts with ICE in 2015, becoming the bread and butter of ICE’s surveillance capacities by mining personal data from thousands of sources for government authorities, converting it into searchable databases, and mapping connections between individuals and organizations. By 2017, conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were becoming essential too, signing over the cloud services to host mounds of citizens’ and residents’ personal information. … Where AI falters technically, it delivers ideologically. …
“The parts are all in place. According to recent reports, Palantir is building ICE an ‘immigrationOS’ that can generate reports on immigrants and visa holders — including what they look like, where they live, and where they travel — and monitor their location in real time. ICE will use the database combined with a trove of other AI tools to surveil immigrants’ social media accounts, and to track down and detain ‘antisemites’ and ‘terrorists,’ according to a recent announcement by the State Department. ‘We need to get better at treating this like a business,’ Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a speech at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix earlier this month, ‘like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.’”