Researchers catalogued the most costly U.S. storms, wildfires and floods after the Trump administration halted a federal database last year.

Although most permits are sold at quarterly government auctions, a secondary market enables daily transactions similar to a stock market.

The criticism comes as the administration moves toward finalizing CAFE standards that would make vehicles less efficient in 2031 than they are today.

State Sen. Steve Padilla introduced the bill on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles wildfires.

The stalled progress comes as a disappointing reversal after the gains achieved in the first few years following the launch of the city's Climate Smart plan in 2018.

Expected to open in early 2026, it will become the only bridge from Michigan to Canada that allows for foot and bike traffic, joining just a few other U.S.-Canadian crossings with pedestrian lanes.

According to the government, the foreign funds Harjeet Singh is suspected of receiving were intended to promote the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty.

The country’s overall emissions fell by 9 million tons to 640 million, with higher pollution from the building and transport sectors slowing down overall progress.

In an advance that could help ensure people are taking their medication on schedule, MIT engineers have designed a pill that can report when it has been swallowed.

The new reporting system, which can be incorporated into existing pill capsules, contains a biodegradable radio frequency antenna. After it sends out the signal that the pill has been consumed, most components break down in the stomach while a tiny RF chip passes out of the body through the digestive tract.

This type of system could be useful for monitoring transplant patients who need to take immunosuppressive drugs, or people with infections such as HIV or TB, who need treatment for an extended period of time, the researchers say.

“The goal is to make sure that this helps people receive the therapy they need to help maximize their health,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Traverso is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in Nature Communications. Mehmet Girayhan Say, an MIT research scientist, and Sean You, a former MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper.

A pill that communicates

Patients’ failure to take their medicine as prescribed is a major challenge that contributes to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and billions of dollars in health care costs annually.

To make it easier for people to take their medication, Traverso’s lab has worked on delivery capsules that can remain in the digestive tract for days or weeks, releasing doses at predetermined times. However, this approach may not be compatible with all drugs.

“We’ve developed systems that can stay in the body for a long time, and we know that those systems can improve adherence, but we also recognize that for certain medications, we can’t change the pill,” Traverso says. “The question becomes: What else can we do to help the person and help their health care providers ensure that they’re receiving the medication?”

In their new study, the researchers focused on a strategy that would allow doctors to more closely monitor whether patients are taking their medication. Using radio frequency — a type of signal that can be easily detected from outside the body and is safe for humans — they designed a capsule that can communicate after the patient has swallowed it.

There have been previous efforts to develop RF-based signaling devices for medication capsules, but those were all made from components that don’t break down easily in the body and would need to travel through the digestive system.

To minimize the potential risk of any blockage of the GI tract, the MIT team decided to create an RF-based system that would be bioresorbable, meaning that it can be broken down and absorbed by the body. The antenna that sends out the RF signal is made from zinc, and it is embedded into a cellulose particle.

“We chose these materials recognizing their very favorable safety profiles and also environmental compatibility,” Traverso says.

The zinc-cellulose antenna is rolled up and placed inside a capsule along with the drug to be delivered. The outer layer of the capsule is made from gelatin coated with a layer of cellulose and either molybdenum or tungsten, which blocks any RF signal from being emitted.

Once the capsule is swallowed, the coating breaks down, releasing the drug along with the RF antenna. The antenna can then pick up an RF signal sent from an external receiver and, working with a small RF chip, sends back a signal to confirm that the capsule was swallowed. This communication happens within 10 minutes of the pill being swallowed.

The RF chip, which is about 400 by 400 micrometers, is an off-the-shelf chip that is not biodegradable and would need to be excreted through the digestive tract. All of the other components would break down in the stomach within a week.

“The components are designed to break down over days using materials with well-established safety profiles, such as zinc and cellulose, which are already widely used in medicine,” Say says. “Our goal is to avoid long-term accumulation while enabling reliable confirmation that a pill was taken, and longer-term safety will continue to be evaluated as the technology moves toward clinical use.”

Promoting adherence

Tests in an animal model showed that the RF signal was successfully transmitted from inside the stomach and could be read by an external receiver at a distance up to 2 feet away. If developed for use in humans, the researchers envision designing a wearable device that could receive the signal and then transmit it to the patient’s health care team.

The researchers now plan to do further preclinical studies and hope to soon test the system in humans. One patient population that could benefit greatly from this type of monitoring is people who have recently had organ transplants and need to take immunosuppressant drugs to make sure their body doesn’t reject the new organ.

“We want to prioritize medications that, when non-adherence is present, could have a really detrimental effect for the individual,” Traverso says.

Other populations that could benefit include people who have recently had a stent inserted and need to take medication to help prevent blockage of the stent, people with chronic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, and people with neuropsychiatric disorders whose conditions may impair their ability to take their medication.

The research was funded by Novo Nordisk, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Division of Gastroenterology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which notes that the views and conclusions contained in this article are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States Government.

This work was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano’s facilities.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 08 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02526-4

Although climate action is undermined by political interests and institutional inertia, multiple safeguards are in place to prevent backsliding on progress so far, and positive feedbacks reinforce progress despite opposing forces. Key elements of climate action are irreversible and can be further strengthened by commitments, investments and positive narratives.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 08 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02521-9

Advanced monsoon onset prediction with multi-week lead time via an artificial intelligence (AI) weather model helps smallholder farmers adapt to a changing climate.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 08 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02546-0

Climate action clearly needs greater ambition in the face of increasing physical, biological and social impacts. However, it is important to acknowledge successes, including safeguards that protect action so far, and there are initiatives being implemented across scales that are effective.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change underpins global efforts to address rising temperatures.

For decades, scientists with big questions about biology have found answers in a tiny worm. That worm — a millimeter-long creature called Caenorhabditis elegans — has helped researchers uncover fundamental features of how cells and organisms work. The impact of that work is enormous: Discoveries made using C. elegans have been recognized with four Nobel Prizes and have led to the development of new treatments for human disease.

In a perspective piece published in the November 2025 issue of the journal PNAS, 11 biologists including Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Biology at MIT, celebrate Nobel Prize-winning advances made through research in C. elegans. The authors discuss how that work has led to advances for human health, and highlight how a uniquely collaborative community among worm researchers has fueled the field.

MIT scientists are well represented in that community: The prominent worm biologists who coauthored the PNAS paper include former MIT graduate students Andrew Fire PhD ’83 and Paul Sternberg PhD ’84, now at Stanford University and Caltech, respectively; and two past members of Horvitz’s lab, Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79, who is now at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and former postdoc Gary Ruvkun of Massachusetts General Hospital. Ann Rougvie at the University of Minnesota is the paper’s corresponding author.

“This tiny worm is beautiful — elegant both in its appearance and in its many contributions to our understanding of the biological universe in which we live,” says Horvitz, who in 2002 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with colleagues Sydney Brenner and John Sulston, for discoveries that helped explain how genes regulate programmed cell death and organ development. 

Early worm discoveries

Those discoveries were among the early successes in C. elegans research, made by pioneering scientists who recognized the power of the microscopic roundworm. C. elegans offers many advantages for researchers: The worms are easy to grow and maintain in labs; their transparent bodies make cells and internal processes readily visible under a microscope; they are cellularly very simple (e.g., they have only 302 nerve cells, compared with about 100 billion in a human) and their genomes can be readily manipulated to study gene function.

Most importantly, many of the molecules and processes that operate in C. elegans have been retained throughout evolution, meaning discoveries made using the worm can have direct relevance to other organisms, including humans. 

“Many aspects of biology are ancient and evolutionarily conserved,” Horvitz, who is also a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, as well as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Such shared mechanisms can be most readily revealed by analyzing organisms that are highly tractable in the laboratory.”

In the 1960s, Brenner, a molecular biologist who was curious about how animals’ nervous systems develop and function, recognized that C. elegans offered unique opportunities to study these processes. Once he began developing the worm into a model for laboratory studies, it did not take long for other biologists to join him to take advantage of the new system.

In the 1970s, the unique features of the worm allowed Sulston to track the transformation of a fertilized egg into an adult animal, tracing the origins of each of the adult worm’s 959 cells. His studies revealed that in every developing worm, cells divide and mature in predictable ways. He also learned that some of the cells created during development do not survive into adulthood, and are instead eliminated by a process termed programmed cell death.

By seeking mutations that perturbed the process of programmed cell death, Horvitz and his colleagues identified key regulators of that process, which is sometimes referred to as apoptosis. These regulators, which both promote and oppose apoptosis, turned out to be vital for programmed cell death across the animal kingdom.

In humans, apoptosis shapes developing organs, refines brain circuits, and optimizes other tissue structures. It also modulates our immune systems and eliminates cells that are in danger of becoming cancerous. The human version of CED-9, the anti-apoptotic regulator that Horvitz’s team discovered in worms, is BCL-2. Researchers have shown that activating apoptotic cell death by blocking BCL-2 is an effective treatment for certain blood cancers. Today, researchers are also exploring new ways of treating immune disorders and neurodegenerative disease by manipulating apoptosis pathways.

Collaborative worm community

Horvitz and his colleagues’ discoveries about apoptosis helped demonstrate that understanding C. elegans biology has direct relevance to human biology and disease. Since then, a vibrant and closely connected community of worm biologists — including many who trained in Horvitz’s lab — has continued to carry out impactful work. In their PNAS article, Horvitz and his coauthors highlight that early work, as well as the Nobel Prize-winning work of:

• Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, whose discovery of an RNA-based system of gene silencing led to powerful new tools to manipulate gene activity. The innate process they discovered in worms, known as RNA interference, is now used as the basis of six FDA-approved therapeutics for genetic disorders, silencing faulty genes to stop their harmful effects.
• Martin Chalfie, who used a fluorescent protein made by jellyfish to visualize and track specific cells in C. elegans, helping launch the development of a set of tools that transformed biologists’ ability to observe molecules and processes that are important for both health and disease.
• Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who discovered a class of molecules called microRNAs that regulate gene activity not just in worms, but in all multicellular organisms. This prize-winning work was started when Ambros and Ruvkun were postdocs in Horvitz’s lab. Humans rely on more than 1,000 microRNAs to ensure our genes are used at the right times and places. Disruptions to microRNAs have been linked to neurological disorders, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disease, and researchers are now exploring how these small molecules might be used for diagnosis or treatment.

Horvitz and his coauthors stress that while the worm itself made these discoveries possible, so too did a host of resources that facilitate collaboration within the worm community and enable its scientists to build upon the work of others. Scientists who study C. elegans have embraced this open, collaborative spirit since the field’s earliest days, Horvitz says, citing the Worm Breeder’s Gazette, an early newsletter where scientists shared their observations, methods, and ideas.

Today, scientists who study C. elegans — whether the organism is the centerpiece of their lab or they are looking to supplement studies of other systems — contribute to and rely on online resources like WormAtlas and WormBase, as well as the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, to share data and genetic tools. Horvitz says these resources have been crucial to his own lab’s work; his team uses them every day.

Just as molecules and processes discovered in C. elegans have pointed researchers toward important pathways in human cells, the worm has also been a vital proving ground for developing methods and approaches later deployed to study more complex organisms. For example, C. elegans, with its 302 neurons, was the first animal for which neuroscientists successfully mapped all of the connections of the nervous system. The resulting wiring diagram, or connectome, has guided countless experiments exploring how neurons work together to process information and control behavior. Informed by both the power and limitations of the C. elegans’ connectome, scientists are now mapping more complex circuitry, such as the 139,000-neuron brain of the fruit fly, whose connectome was completed in 2024.

C. elegans remains a mainstay of biological research, including in neuroscience. Scientists worldwide are using the worm to explore new questions about neural circuits, neurodegeneration, development, and disease. Horvitz’s lab continues to turn to C. elegans to investigate the genes that control animal development and behavior. His team is now using the worm to explore how animals develop a sense of time and transmit that information to their offspring.

Also at MIT, Steven Flavell’s team in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory is using the worm to investigate how neural connectivity, activity, and modulation integrate internal states, such as hunger, with sensory information, such as the smell of food, to produce sometimes long-lasting behaviors. (Flavell is Horvitz’s academic grandson, as Flavell trained with one of Horvitz’s postdoctoral trainees.)

As new technologies accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, Horvitz and his colleagues are confident that the humble worm will bring more unexpected insights.

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work officially launched on Nov. 3, 2025, bringing together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore critical questions about economic opportunity, technology, and democracy.

Co-directed by MIT professors Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, the new Stone Center analyzes the forces that contribute to growing income and wealth inequality through the erosion of job quality and labor market opportunities for workers without a college degree. The center identifies innovative ways to move the economy onto a more equitable trajectory.

MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan opened the launch event by emphasizing the urgency and importance of the center's mission. “As artificial intelligence tools become more powerful, and as they are deployed more broadly,” he said, “we will need to strive to ensure that people from all kinds of backgrounds can find opportunity in the economy.”

Here are some of the key takeaways from participants in the afternoon’s discussions on wealth inequality, liberalism, and pro-worker AI.

Wealth inequality is driven by private business and public policy

Owen Zidar of Princeton University stressed that owners of businesses like car dealerships, construction firms, and franchises make up a significant portion of the top 1 percent. “For every public company CEO that gets a lot of attention,” he explained, “there are a thousand private business owners who have at least $25 million in wealth.” These business owners have outsized political influence through overrepresentation, lobbying, and donations.

Atif Mian of Princeton University connected high inequality to the U.S. debt crisis, arguing that massive savings at the top aren’t being channeled into productive investment. Instead, falling interest rates push the government to run increasingly large fiscal deficits.

To mitigate wealth inequality, speakers highlighted policy proposals including rolling back the 20 percent deduction for private business owners and increasing taxes on wealth.

However, policies must be carefully designed. Antoinette Schoar of the MIT Sloan School of Management explained how mortgage subsidy policies after the 2008 financial crisis actually worsened inequality by disadvantaging poorer potential homeowners.

Governments must provide basic public goods and economic security

Marc Dunkelman of the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University identified excessive red tape as a key problem for modern liberal democracy. “We can’t build high-speed rail. You can’t build enough housing,” he explained. “That spurs ordinary people who want government to work into the populist camp. We did this to ourselves.”

Josh Cohen of Apple University/the University of California at Berkeley emphasized that liberalism must deliver shared prosperity and fair opportunities, not just protect individual freedoms. When people lack economic security, they may turn to leaders who abandon liberal principles altogether.

Liberal democracy needs to adapt while keeping its core values

Helena Rosenblatt Dhar of the City University of New York Graduate Center noted that liberalism and democracy have not always been allies. Historically, “civil equality was very important, but not political equality,” she said. “Liberals were very wary of the masses.”

Speakers emphasized that liberalism’s challenge today is maintaining its commitments to limiting authoritarian power and protecting fundamental freedoms, while addressing its failures.

Doing so, in Dunkelman’s view, would mean working to “eliminate the sowing [of] the seeds of populism by making government properly balance individual rights and the will of the many.”

People-centric politics requires regulating social media

In his keynote at the launch, U.S. Representative Jake Auchincloss (Massachusetts 4th District) connected these notions of government effectiveness and public trust to the influence of technology. He emphasized the need to regulate social media platforms.

“In my opinion, media is upstream of culture, which is upstream of politics,” he said. “If we want a better culture, and certainly if we want a better politics, we need a better media.”

Auchincloss proposed that regulation should include holding social media companies liable for content and banning targeted advertising to minors.

He also echoed the urgency and importance of the center’s research agenda, particularly to understand whether AI will augment or replace labor.

“My bias has always been: Technology creates more jobs,” he said. “Maybe it’s different this time. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Augmentation is key to pro-worker AI — but it may require alternative AI architectures

Stone Center co-director Daron Acemoglu argued that expanding what humans can do, rather than automating their tasks, is essential for achieving pro-worker AI.

However, Acemoglu cautioned that this won’t happen by itself, noting that the business models of tech companies and their focus on artificial general intelligence are not aligned with a pro-worker vision for AI. This vision may require public investment in alternative AI architectures focused on “domain-specific, reliable knowledge.”

Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania noted that AI labs are explicitly trying to “replace people at everything” and are “absolutely convinced that they can do this in the very near term.”

Meanwhile, companies have “no model for AI adoption,” Mollick explained. “There is absolute confusion.” Even so, “there’s enough money at stake [that] the machine keeps moving forward,” underscoring the urgency of intervention.

In a glimpse of what such intervention could look like, Zana Buçinca of Microsoft shared research findings that accounting for workers’ values and cognition in AI design can enable better complementarity.

“The impact of AI on human work is not destiny,” she emphasized. “It’s design.”

When the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) launched in fall 2024, it was designed to elevate scholars at the frontiers of human-centered research and education, and to provide them with resources to pursue their most innovative and ambitious ideas. 

At the inaugural MITHIC Annual Event on Nov. 17, 2025, faculty from across the Institute shared the progress and impact of the projects they’ve advanced this past year with support from the presidential initiative. 

In opening remarks, MIT President Sally Kornbluth noted the “incredible range of opportunities for faculty and students to ask new questions and arrive at better, bolder, and more nuanced answers, grounded in the wisdom of the humanities, arts, and social sciences,” that MITHIC has sparked in its first year. 

Kornbluth highlighted the Living Climate Futures Lab as an example of the kind of work MITHIC was designed to support. “The lab works with people in communities from Massachusetts to Mongolia who are grappling with the impacts of climate change on their daily lives — on health and food security, housing, and jobs,” she said. The initiative, which was the focus of a panel discussion during the event, received MITHIC’s inaugural Faculty-Driven Initiative (FDI) seed grant.

“Like all the projects that MITHIC supports, the Living Climate Futures Lab also embodies MIT’s singular brand of excellence: collaborative, hands-on, and is deeply relevant to the world and the people around us,” added Kornbluth. 

MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan welcomed the audience, noting that “MITHIC is off to a strong start, advancing work across the Institute that broadens our perspective on global challenges.

“MITHIC is about inspiring our community to think differently and work together in new ways. It is about embedding human-centered thinking throughout our research, innovation, and education,” added Chandrakasan, who serves as co-chair of MITHIC.

Keynote speaker Rick Locke, the John C. Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, spoke to the “Human Side of Enterprise,” zeroing in on the challenges and opportunities that will determine the future of management education — and how MIT Sloan can position itself at the forefront. In practice, that means the work of MIT Sloan and MITHIC can shape how new technologies like artificial intelligence will reconfigure industries and careers. 

Of equal importance, Locke said, will be how new enterprises are created and run, how people work and live, how business practices become more sustainable, and how national economies develop and adapt.

“MIT has a history of charting and paving pathways to an exciting and productive future of work that not only includes humans, but makes the most of our humanity. Together we can invent this future,” said Locke, who earned his doctorate in MIT’s Department of Political Science and later served as head of the department.

After his address, Locke joined Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and co-chair of MITHIC, for a fireside chat.

Bringing the classics back to life

In a session exploring innovations in MIT education, Kieran Setiya, the Peter de Florez Professor of Philosophy, detailed what he and his colleagues are calling a “Great Books” initiative. 

As part of a three-year pilot, faculty in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy have developed a two-semester sequence that focuses on books that reward repeated reading. The courses are loosely integrated and offered as electives, filling what Setiya calls an “urgent need for students to grapple with expansive questions about human nature, human knowledge, ethics, society, and politics” at a time of rapid social and technological change.

As students explore the work of authors like Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Virgil, Virginia Woolf, W.E.B. DuBois, and Simone de Beauvoir, they develop a deeper understanding of history, culture, and social change. These attributes, Setiya says, “will make students better people and better citizens. We're not just preparing MIT students to land high-paying jobs, but to solve human problems and to make the world a better place.”

AI and its impact

During a session on the use of AI, Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, shared research she is working on in India with co-project lead Marzyeh Ghassemi, associate professor and the Germeshausen Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). 

Duflo explained that the team is using AI to identify undiagnosed “silent” heart attacks, aiming to improve diagnosis and treatment of heart disease, the country’s No. 1 cause of death. The research team harnessed the power of a cheap diagnostic tool — a handheld electrocardiogram (ECG) device — to collect data on 6,000 patients who visited local health camps to predict their risk of a heart attack. 

They then paired the initial data with follow-up data from a cardiac ultrasound, which was able to confirm if patients experienced one. The researchers used this paired data and their own novel algorithm to train the ECG devices to more accurately assess a patient’s risk. The results are encouraging: 

“What is remarkable compared to existing tests is that it catches young people who are less likely to have had a silent heart attack, but still have a high risk. Right now, those young people are completely excluded from the current screening, because it’s basically based only on age,” Duflo said.

Reconstructing the music of the past

The day also featured a musical demonstration using three different replicas of an ancient Paracas whistle that a team from MIT recreated in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).

It was a practical example of how Mark Rau, an assistant professor in music and theater arts with a shared appointment in EECS, and Benjamin Sabatini, a senior postdoc in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, are using CT scan technology to create models of ancient instruments, measure their vibrations and acoustic parameters, and produce functional reproductions. 

The team offered a step-by-step overview of the process they’ve used to assess the instruments and create the 3D-printed plaster molds, working alongside Jared Katz, the Pappalardo Curator of Musical Instruments at the MFA, resulting in a playable replica of an instrument used centuries ago. 

“What we’re really excited about is getting these kinds of replicas in the hands of students and musicians, and having experimental engagements. We’re also really excited about the printed replicas that allow the collection to be activated in new ways,” Katz explained.

The event featured Q&A opportunities throughout the day, as well as a reception at the close of the day. MITHIC’s second call for proposals this fall yielded nearly 80 submissions, which are under review for funding in 2026. 

A new call for proposals for the SHASS+ Connectivity Fund will be held in spring 2026. SHASS+ supports projects led by a SHASS scholar and a collaborator from another part of the Institute. Another call for proposals for the next FDI seed grant will also take place in spring 2026. 

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)

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