Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a new budget under the current administration, and they are going on a surveillance tech shopping spree. Standing at $28.7 billion dollars for the year 2025 (nearly triple their 2024 budget) and at least another $56.25 billion over the next three years, ICE's budget would be the envy of many national militaries around the world. Indeed, this budget would put ICE as the 14th most well-funded military in the world, right between Ukraine and Israel.  

There are many different agencies under U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that deal with immigration, as well as non-immigration related agencies such as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). ICE is specifically the enforcement arm of the U.S. immigration apparatus. Their stated mission is to “[p]rotect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.” 

Of course, ICE doesn’t just end up targeting, surveilling, harassing, assaulting, detaining, and torturing people who are undocumented immigrants. They have targeted people on work permits, asylum seekers, permanent residents (people holding “green cards”), naturalized citizens, and even citizens by birth. 

While the NSA and FBI might be the first agencies that come to mind when thinking about surveillance in the U.S., ICE should not be discounted. ICE has always engaged in surveillance and intelligence-gathering as part of their mission. A 2022 report by Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology found the following:

• ICE had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults.
• ICE had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.
• ICE was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.
• ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.
• ​​ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies.
• ICE spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs. 

With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years, ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history. 

How We Got Here

The entire surveillance industry has been allowed to grow and flourish under both Democratic and Republican regimes. For example, President Obama dramatically expanded ICE from its more limited origins, while at the same time narrowing its focus to undocumented people accused of crimes. Under the first and second Trump administrations, ICE ramped up its operations significantly, increasing raids in major cities far from the southern border and casting a much wider net on potential targets. ICE has most recently expanded its partnerships with sheriffs across the U.S., and deported more than 1.5 million people cumulatively under the Trump administrations (600,000 of those were just during the first year of Trump’s second term according to DHS statistics), not including the 1.6 million people DHS claims have “self-deported.” More horrifying is that in just the last year of the current administration, 4,250 people detained by ICE have gone missing, and 31 have died in custody or while being detained. In contrast, 24 people died in ICE custody during the entirety of the Biden administration.

ICE also has openly stated that they plan to spy on the American public, looking for any signs of left-wing dissent against their domestic military-like presence. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a recent interview that his agency “was dedicated to the mission of going after” Antifa and left-wing gun clubs. 

On a long enough timeline, any surveillance tool you build will eventually be used by people you don’t like for reasons that you disagree with.

On a long enough timeline, any surveillance tool you build will eventually be used by people you don’t like for reasons that you disagree with. A surveillance-industrial complex and a democratic society are fundamentally incompatible, regardless of your political party. 

EFF recently published a guide to using government databases to dig up homeland security spending and compiled our own dataset of companies selling tech to DHS components. In 2025, ICE entered new contracts with several private companies for location surveillance, social media surveillance, face surveillance, spyware, and phone surveillance. Let’s dig into each.

Phone Surveillance Tools 

One common surveillance tactic of immigration officials is to get physical access to a person’s phone, either while the person is detained at a border crossing, or while they are under arrest. ICE renewed an $11 million contract with a company called Cellebrite, which helps ICE unlock phones and then can take a complete image of all the data on the phone, including apps, location history, photos, notes, call records, text messages, and even Signal and WhatsApp messages. ICE also signed a $3 million contract with Cellebrite’s main competitor Magnet Forensics, makers of the Graykey device for unlocking phones. DHS has had contracts with Cellebrite since 2008, but the number of phones they search has risen dramatically each year, reaching a new high of 14,899 devices searched by ICE’s sister agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) between April and June of 2025. 

If ICE can’t get physical access to your phone, that won’t stop them from trying to gain access to your data. They have also resumed a $2 million contract with the spyware manufacturer, Paragon. Paragon makes the Graphite spyware, which made headlines in 2025 for being found on the phones of several dozen members of Italian civil society. Graphite is able to harvest messages from multiple different encrypted chat apps such as Signal and WhatsApp without the user ever knowing. 

Our concern with ICE buying this software is the likelihood that it will be used against undocumented people and immigrants who are here legally, as well as U.S. citizens who have spoken up against ICE or who work with immigrant communities. Malware such as Graphite can be used to read encrypted messages as they are sent, other forms of spyware can also download files, photos, location history, record phone calls, and even discretely turn on your microphone to record you. 

How to Protect Yourself 

The most effective way to protect yourself from smartphone surveillance would be to not have a phone. But that’s not realistic advice in modern society. Fortunately, for most people there are other ways you can make it harder for ICE to spy on your digital life. 

The first and easiest step is to keep your phone up to date. Installing security updates makes it harder to use malware against you and makes it less likely for Cellebrite to break into your phone. Likewise, both iPhone (Lockdown Mode) and Android (Advanced Protection) offer special modes that lock your phone down and can help protect against some malware.

The first and easiest step is to keep your phone up to date.

Having your phone’s software up to date and locked with a strong alphanumeric password will offer some protection against Cellebrite, depending on your model of phone. However, the strongest protection is simply to keep your phone turned off, which puts it in “before first unlock” mode and has been typically harder for law enforcement to bypass. This is good to do if you are at a protest and expect to be arrested, if you are crossing a border, or if you are expecting to encounter ICE. Keeping your phone on airplane mode should be enough to protect against cell-site simulators, but turning your phone off will offer extra protection against cell-site simulators and Cellebrite devices. If you aren’t able to turn your phone off, it’s a good idea to at least turn off face/fingerprint unlock to make it harder for police to force you to unlock your phone. While EFF continues to fight to strengthen our legal protections against compelling people to decrypt their devices, there is currently less protection against compelled face and fingerprint unlocking than there is against compelled password disclosure.

Internet Surveillance 

ICE has also spent $5 million to acquire at least two location and social media surveillance tools: Webloc and Tangles, from a company called Pen Link, an established player in the open source intelligence space. Webloc gathers the locations of millions of phones by gathering data from mobile data brokers and linking it together with other information about users. Tangles is a social media surveillance tool which combines web scraping with access to social media application programming interfaces. These tools are able to build a dossier on anyone who has a public social media account. Tangles is able to link together a person’s posting history, posts, and comments containing keywords, location history, tags, social graph, and photos with those of their friends and family. Penlink then sells this information to law enforcement, allowing law enforcement to avoid the need for a warrant. This means ICE can look up historic and current locations of many people all across the U.S. without ever having to get a warrant.

These tools are able to build a dossier on anyone who has a public social media account.

ICE also has established contracts with other social media scanning and AI analysis companies, such as a $4.2 million contract with a company called Fivecast for the social media surveillance and AI analysis tool ONYX. According to Fivecast, ONYX can conduct “automated, continuous and targeted collection of multimedia data” from all major “news streams, search engines, social media, marketplaces, the dark web, etc.” ONYX can build what it calls “digital footprints” from biographical data and curated datasets spanning numerous platforms, and “track shifts in sentiment and emotion” and identify the level of risk associated with an individual. 

Another contract is with ShadowDragon for their product Social Net, which is able to monitor publicly available data from over 200 websites. In an acquisition document from 2022, ICE confirmed that ShadowDragon allowed the agency to search “100+ social networking sites,” noting that “[p]ersistent access to Facebook and Twitter provided by ShadowDragon SocialNet is of the utmost importance as they are the most prominent social media platforms.”

ICE has also indicated that they intend to spend between 20 and 50 million dollars on building and staffing a 24/7 social media monitoring office with at least 30 full time agents to comb every major social media website for leads that could generate enforcement raids. 

How to protect yourself 

For U.S. citizens, making your account private on social media is a good place to start. You might also consider having accounts under a pseudonym, or deleting your social media accounts altogether. For more information, check out our guide to protecting yourself on social media. Unfortunately, people immigrating to the U.S. might be subject to greater scrutiny, including mandatory social media checks, and should consult with an immigration attorney before taking any action. For people traveling to the U.S., new rules will soon likely require them to reveal five years of social media history and 10 years of past email addresses to immigration officials. 

Street-Level Surveillance 

But it’s not just your digital habits ICE wants to surveil; they also want to spy on you in the physical world. ICE has contracts with multiple automated license plate reader (ALPR) companies and is able to follow the driving habits of a large percentage of Americans. ICE uses this data to track down specific people anywhere in the country. ICE has a $6 million contract through a Thomson Reuters subsidiary to access ALPR data from Motorola Solutions. ICE has also persuaded local law enforcement officers to run searches on their behalf through Flock Safety's massive network of ALPR data. CBP, including Border Patrol, also operates a network of covert ALPR systems in many areas. 

ICE has also invested in biometric surveillance tools, such as face recognition software called Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of people they stop to determine if they are here legally. Mobile Fortify checks the pictures it takes against a database of 200 million photos for a match (the source of the photos is unknown). Additionally, ICE has a $10 million contract with Clearview AI for face recognition. ICE has also contracted with iris scanning company BI2 technologies for even more invasive biometric surveillance. ICE agents have also been spotted wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban video recording sunglasses. 

ICE has acquired trucks equipped with cell-site simulators (AKA Stingrays) from a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (likely the cell-site simulators were manufactured by another company). This is not the first time ICE has bought this technology. According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, ICE deployed cell-site simulators at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019, and ICE more than 1,885 times between 2013 and 2017, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. Cell-site simulators can be used to track down a specific person in real time, with more granularity than a phone company or tools like Webloc can provide, though Webloc has the distinct advantage of being used without a warrant and not requiring agents to be in the vicinity of the person being tracked. 

How to protect yourself 

Taking public transit or bicycling is a great way to keep yourself off ALPR databases, but an even better way is to go to your local city council meetings and demand the city cancels contracts with ALPR companies, like people have done in Flagstaff, Arizona; Eugene, Oregon; and Denver, Colorado, among others. 

If you are at a protest, putting your phone on airplane mode could help protect you from cell-site simulators and from apps on your phone disclosing your location, but might leave you vulnerable to advanced targeted attacks. For more advanced protection, turning your phone completely off protects against all radio based attacks, and also makes it harder for tools like Cellebrite to break into your phone as discussed above. But each individual will need to weigh their need for security from advanced radio based attacks against their need to document potential abuses through photo or video. For more information about protecting yourself at a protest, head over to SSD.

There is nothing you can do to change your face, which is why we need more stringent privacy laws such as Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Tying All the Data Together 

Last but not least, ICE uses tools to combine and search all this data along with the data on Americans they have acquired from private companies, the IRS, TSA, and other government databases. 

To search all this data, ICE uses ImmigrationOS, a system that came from a $30-million contract with Palantir. What Palantir does is hard to explain, even for people who work there, but essentially they are plumbers. Palantir makes it so that ICE has all the data they have acquired in one place so it’s easy to search through. Palantir links data from different databases, like IRS data, immigration records, and private databases, and enables ICE to view all of this data about a specific person in one place. 

Palantir makes it so that ICE has all the data they have acquired in one place so it’s easy to search through.

The true civil liberties nightmare of Palantir is that they enable governments to link data that should have never been linked. There are good civil liberties reasons why IRS data was never linked with immigration data and was never linked with social media data, but Palantir breaks those firewalls. Palantir has labeled themselves as a progressive, human rights centric company historically, but their recent actions have given them away as just another tech company enabling surveillance nightmares.

Threat Modeling When ICE Is Your Adversary 

 Understanding the capabilities and limits of ICE and how to threat model helps you and your community fight back, remain powerful, and protect yourself.

One of the most important things you can do is to not spread rumors and misinformation. Rumors like “ICE has malware so now everyone's phones are compromised” or “Palantir knows what you are doing all the time” or “Signal is broken” don’t help your community. It’s more useful to spread facts, ways to protect yourself, and ways to fight back. For information about how to create a security plan for yourself or your community, and other tips to protect yourself, read our Surveillance Self-Defense guides.

How EFF Is Fighting Back

One way to fight back against ICE is in the courts. EFF currently has a lawsuit against ICE over their pressure on Apple and Google to take down ICE spotting apps, like ICEBlock. We also represent multiple labor unions suing ICE over their social media surveillance practices. 

We have also demanded the San Francisco Police Department stop sharing data illegally with ICE, and issued a statement condemning the collaboration between ICE and the malware provider Paragon. We also continue to maintain our Rayhunter project for detecting cell-site simulators. 

Other civil liberties organizations are also suing ICE. ACLU has sued ICE over a subpoena to Meta attempting to identify the owner of an account providing advice to protestors, and another coalition of groups has thus far successfully sued the IRS to stop sharing taxpayer data with ICE. 

We need to have a hard look at the surveillance industry. It is a key enabler of vast and untold violations of human rights and civil liberties, and it continues to be used by aspiring autocrats to threaten our very democracy. As long as it exists, the surveillance industry, and the data it generates, will be an irresistible tool for anti-democratic forces.

Related Cases: EFF v. DOJ, DHS (ICE tracking apps)

The New York City Wegman’s is collecting biometric information about customers.

Scientists are racing to rescue hundreds of datasets, websites and federal reports that have been deleted by the administration.

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New research into the deadly blazes reveal changes to blood chemistry. But it could take decades to find the full effects.

Connecticut and Rhode Island are requesting a preliminary injunction to block the department's suspension of Revolution Wind.

The move follows a 2024 legal settlement with climate activists. The state has less than 20 years to meet its decarbonization goal.

The Trump administration is looking for ways to lure energy investors back to the oil-rich South American country, despite the high risks.

Suburbs on the fringes of centers including Sydney, Melbourne and Perth now house at least 6.9 million inhabitants where homes adjoin highly flammable grasslands, says a report.

As part of a ceremony, an Orthodox Christian priest cast a cross into the visibly depleted waters of Lake Marathon, an artificial reservoir north of Athens.

Authorities declared a 14-day emergency response period to speed the delivery of aid, evacuations and infrastructure repairs.

A new study, which includes solutions for extreme heat, flooding, wildfires and droughts, adds to the growing conversation around adaptation.

Age verification mandates are spreading fast, and they’re ushering in a new age of online surveillance, censorship, and exclusion for everyone—not just young people. Age-gating laws generally require websites and apps to collect sensitive data from every user, often through invasive tools like ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious “estimation” methods, before granting them access to certain content or services. Lawmakers tout these laws as the silver-bullet solution to “kids’ online safety,” but in reality, age-verification mandates wall off large swaths of the web, build sweeping new surveillance infrastructure, increase the risk of data breaches and real-life privacy harms, and threaten the anonymity that has long allowed people to seek support, explore new ideas, and organize and build community online.

Join EFF's Rindala Alajaji and Alexis Hancock along with Hana Memon from Gen-Z for Change and Cynthia Conti-Cook from Collaborative Research Center for Resilience for a conversation about what we stand to lose as more and more governments push to age-gate the web. We’ll break down how these laws work, who they exclude, and how these mandates threaten privacy and free expression for people of all ages. The conversation will be followed by a live Q&A. 

EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
The Human Cost of Online Age Verification
Thursday, January 15th
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Pacific
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Recording

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This guide was co-written by Andrew Zuker with support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

The U.S. government publishes volumes of detailed data on the money it spends, but searching through it and finding information can be challenging. Complex search functions and poor user interfaces on government reporting sites can hamper an investigation, as can inconsistent company profiles and complex corporate ownership structures. 

This week, EFF and the Heinrich Boell Foundation released an update to our database of vendors providing technology to components of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protections (CBP). It includes new vendor profiles, new fields, and updated data on top contractors, so that journalists and researchers have a jumping-off point for their own investigations.

Access the dataset through Google Sheets (Google's Privacy Policy applies) or download the Excel file here. 

This time we thought we would also share some of the research methods we developed while assembling this dataset.

This guide covers the key databases that store information on federal spending and contracts (often referred to as "awards"), government solicitations for products and services, and the government's "online shopping superstore," plus a few other deep-in-the-weeds datasets buried in the online bureaucracy. We have provided a step-by-step guide for searching these sites efficiently and help tips for finding information. While we have written this specifically with DHS agencies in mind, it should serve as a useful resource for procurement across the federal government. 

1. Procurement Sites: FPDS.gov and USASpending.Com  Federal Procurement Data System - fpds.gov

The Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) is the best place to start for finding out what companies are working with DHS. It is the official system for tracking federal discretionary spending and contains current data on contracts with non-governmental entities like corporations and private businesses. Award data is up-to-date and includes detailed information on vendors and awards which can be helpful when searching the other systems. It is a little bit old-school, but that often makes it one of the easiest and quickest sites to search, once you get the hang of it, since it offers a lot of options for narrowing search parameters to specific agencies, vendors, classification of services, etc. 

How to Use FDPS
To begin searching Awards for a particular vendor, click into the “ezSearch” field in the center of the page, delete or replace the text “Google-like search to help you find federal contracts…” with a vendor name or keywords, and hit Enter to begin a new search. 

A new tab will open automatically with exact matches at the top. 

Four “Top 10” modules on the left side of the page link to top results in descending order: Department Full Name, Contracting Agency Name, Full Legal Business Name, and Treasury Account Symbol. These ranked lists help the user quickly narrow in on departments and agencies that vendors do business with. DHS may not appear in the “Top 10” results, which may indicate that the vendor hasn’t yet been awarded DHS or subagency contracts.

For example, if you searched the term “FLIR”, as in Teledyne FLIR who make infrared surveillance systems used along the U.S.-Mexico border, DHS is the 2nd result in the “Top 10: Department Full Name” box. 

To see all DHS contracts awarded to the vendor, click “Homeland Security, Department of” from the “Top 10 Department Full Name” module. When the page loads, you will see the subcomponents of DHS (e.g., ICE, CBP, or the U.S. Secret Service) in the lefthand menu. You can click on each of those to drill down even further. You can also drill down by choosing a company. 

Sorting options can be found on the right side of the page which offer the ability to refine and organize search results. One of the most useful is "Date Signed," which will arrange the results in chronological order. 

You don't have to search by a company name. You can also use a product keyword, such as "LPR" (license plate reader). However, because keywords are not consistently used by government agencies, you will need to try various permutations to gather the most data. 

Each click or search filter adds a new term to the search both in the main field at the top and in the Search Criteria module on the right. They can be deleted by clicking the X next to the term in this module or by removing the text in the main search field.

For each contract item, you can click "View" to see the specific details. However, these pages don't have permalinks, so you'll want to print-to-pdf if you need to retain a permanent copy of the record. 

Often the vendor brand name we know from their marketing or news media is not the same entity that is awarded government contracts. Foreign companies in particular rely on partnerships with domestic entities that are established federal contractors. If you can’t find any spending records for a vendor, search the web for information on the company including acquisitions, partnerships, licensing agreements, parent companies, and subsidiaries. It is likely that one of these types of related companies is the contract holder. 

USA Spending - usaspending.gov

The Federal Funding and Accountability Act (FFATA) of 2006 and the DATA Act of 2014 require the government to publish all spending records and contracts on a single, searchable public website, including agency-specific contracts, using unified reporting standards to ensure consistent, reliable, searchable data. This led to the creation of USA Spending (usaspending.gov). 

USA Spending is populated with data from multiple sources including the Federal Procurement Data System (fpds.gov) and the System for Awards Management (sam.gov - which we'll discuss in the next section). It also compiles Treasury Reports and data from the financial systems of dozens of federal agencies. We relied heavily on Awards data from these systems to verify vendor information including contracts with the DHS and its subagencies such as CBP and ICE. 

USA Spending has a more modern interface, but is often very slow with the information often hidden in expandable menus. In many ways it is duplicative of FPDS, but with more features, including the ability to bookmark individual pages. We often found ourselves using FPDS to quickly identify data, and then using the "Award ID" number to find the specific record within USA Spending. 

USA Spending also has some visualizations and ways to analyze data in chart form, which is not possible with the largely text-based FPDS. 

How to Use USA Spending

To begin searching for DHS awards, click on either “Search Award Data” on the navigation bar, or the blue “Start Searching Awards”button. 

On the left of the Search page are a list of drop down menus with options. You can enter a vendor name as a keyword, or expand the “Recipient” menu if you know the full company name or their Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) number. Expand the “Agency Tab” and enter DHS which will bring up the Department of Homeland Security Option.

In the example below, we entered “Palantir Technologies” as a keyword, and selected DHS in the Agency dropdown:

For vendors with hundreds of contracts that return many pages of results, consider adding more filters to the search such as a specific time period or specifying a Funding Agency such as ICE or CBP. In this example, the filters “Palantir Technologies” and “DHS” returned 13 results (at the time of publication). It is important to note that the search results table is larger than what displays in that module. You can scroll down to view more Awards and scroll to the right to see much more information. 

Scroll down outside of that module to reveal more info including modules for Results by Category, Results over Time, and Results by Geography, all of which can be viewed as a list or graph. 

Once you've identified a contract, you can click the "Prime Award ID" to see the granular details for each time. 

From the search, you can also select just the agency to see all the contracts on file. Each agency also has its own page showing a breakdown for every fiscal year of how much money they had to spend and which components spent the most. For example, here's DHS's page.

2. Contracting Opportunities  - SAM.gov  

So far we've talked about how to track contracts and spending, but now let's take a step back and look at how those contracts come to be. The System for Award Management, SAM.gov, is the site that allows companies to see what products and services the government intends to buy so they can bid on the contract. But SAM.gov is also open to the public, which means you can see the same information, including a detailed scope of a project and sometimes even technical details. 

How to Use Sam.gov

SAM.gov does not require an account for its basic contracting opportunity searches, but you may want to create one in order to save the things you find and to receive keyword- or agency-based alerts via email when new items of interest are posted. 

First you will click "Search" in the menu bar, which will bring you to this page: 

We recommend selecting both "Active" and "Inactive" in the Status menu. Contracts quickly go inactive, and besides, sometimes the contracts you are most interested in are several years old. 

If you are researching a particular technology such as unmanned aerial vehicles, you might just type "unmanned" in the Simple Search bar. That will bring up every solicitation with that keyword across the federal government.

One of the most useful features is filtering by agency, while leaving the keyword search blank. This will return a running list of an agency's calls for bids and related procurement activities. It is worth checking regularly. For example, here's what CBP's looks like on a given day: 

If you click on an item, you should next scroll down to see if there are attachments. These tend to contain the most details. Specifically, you should look for the term "SOW," the abbreviation for "Statement of Work." For example, here are the attachments for a CBP contracting opportunity for "Cellular Covert Cameras": 

The first document is the Statement of Work, which tells you the exact brand, model, and number of devices they want to acquire: 

The attachments also included a "BNO Justification." BNO stands for "Brand Name Only," and this document explains in even more detail why CBP wants that specific product:

If you see the terms "Sole Source" in a listing, that also means that an agency has decided that only one product meets its requirements and it will not open bidding to other companies. 

In addition to contracting, many agencies announce "Industry Day" events, usually virtual, that members of the public can join. This is a unique opportunity to listen in on what contractors are being told by government purchasing officials. The presentation slides are also often later uploaded to the SAM.gov page. Occasionally, the list of attendees will also be posted, and you'll find several examples of those lists in our dataset.

3. The Government's "Superstore" - gsaadvantage.gov

Another way to investigate DHS purchasing is by browsing the catalog of items and services immediately available to them. The General Services Administration operates GSA Advantage, which it describes as "the government's central online shopping superstore." The website's search is open, allowing members of the public to view any vendors' offerings–including both products and services– easily as they would with any online marketplace. 

For example, you could search for "license plate reader" and produce a list of available products: 

If you click "Advanced Search," you can also isolate every product available from a particular manufacturer. For example, here are the results when you search for products available from Skydio, a drone manufacturer.

If you switch from "Products" to "Services" you can export datasets for each company about their offerings. For example, if you search for "Palantir" you'll get results that look like this:

This means all these companies are offering some sort of Palantir-related services. If you click "Matches found in Terms and Conditions," you'll download a PDF with a lot of details about what the company offers. 

For example, here's a a screengrab from Anduril's documentation: 

If you click "Matches Found in Price List" you'll download a spreadsheet that serves as a blueprint of what the company offers, including contract personnel. Here's a snippet from Palantir's: 

4. Other Resources

Daily Public Report of Covered Contract Awards - Maybe FPDS isn't enough for you and you want to know every day what contracts have been signed. Buried in the DHS website are links to a daily feed of all contracts worth $4 million or more. It's available in XML, JSON, CSV and XLSX formats. 

DHS Acquisition Planning Forecast System (APFS) - DHS operates a site for vendors to learn about upcoming contracts greater than $350,000. You can sort by agency at a granular level,  such as upcoming projects by ICE Enforcement & Removal Operations. This is one to check regularly for updates. 

DHS Artificial Intelligence Use Case Inventory - Many federal agencies are required to maintain datasets of "AI Use Cases." DHS has broken these out for each of its subcomponents, including ICE and CBP. Advanced users will find the spreadsheet versions of these inventory more interesting. 

NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) - SEWP is a way for agencies to fast track acquisition of "Information Technology, Communication and Audio Visual" products through existing contracts. The site provides an index of existing contract holders, but the somewhat buried "Provider Lookup" has a more comprehensive list of companies involved in this type of contracting, illustrating how the companies serve as passthroughs for one another. Relatedly, DHS's list of "Prime Contractors" shows which companies hold master contracts with the agency and its components. 

TechInquiry - Techinquiry is a small non-profit that aggregates records from a wide variety of sources about tech companies, particularly those involved in government contracting. 

We don’t have many details:

President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

If true, it would mark one of the most public uses of U.S. cyber power against another nation in recent memory. These operations are typically highly classified, and the U.S. is considered one of the most advanced nations in cyberspace operations globally.

The Trump administration is playing a leading role in litigation to stop climate action.

The president’s Energy and Interior secretaries are joining the effort to cajole the petroleum businesses to invest in the country’s shattered oil fields

The ruling rejected efforts by oil giants to dismiss the 2020 lawsuit seeking compensation for the costs of dealing with climate change.

The devastating flood that killed more than 1,000 people in Indonesia was exacerbated by years of deforestation.