404 Media

2026-05-12 13:00:38

ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of Palantir systems now means agency officials effectively have a list of 20 million people readily accessible on their iPhones, increasing the speed at which ICE can find houses to raid and people to arrest, according to comments made by a senior ICE official last week during a border security conference.

While ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally won’t answer questions from journalists about how the agency is using Palantir’s technology, senior officials were much more talkative during the Border Security Expo which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, last week. 404 Media spoke to four people who attended the conference. Here companies looking to sell their technology to ICE or other agencies gathered for two days of speeches, Q&As, and product pitches.

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Do you work for Palantir or ICE? Did you used to? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

The officials’ comments may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but still reflect ICE’s position that Palantir is allowing the agency to identify people to arrest and locations to raid faster. Although the Trump administration has attempted to step back from its mass deportation rhetoric and city wide raids, especially in the wake of killing multiple people, ICE continues to violently and wrongfully detain people. Data from April showed that 70.8 percent, or 42,722, of people held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction.

The four people who attended the Border Security Expo saw Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE, and other DHS officials speak.

At one point, Elliston made the comment about ICE agents having 20 million targets, or potential people to detain, on their iPhones. This list can lead ICE agents to an individual and a house; they can then see if another target might be next door. This target may be a lower priority, but ICE can now use that information to arrest more people.
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At another point, Elliston said that Palantir’s technology has increased ICE’s rate of successfully locating a target from around 27 percent to just under 80 percent.

Two of the attendees were Kenny Morris, a campaigns strategist within the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Action Center for Corporate Accountability, and Dov Baum, director of AFSC’s Action Center for Corporate Accountability. 404 Media is not naming the other two attendees to protect them from professional repercussions.

Investigative work that used to take hours now takes 10 to 15 minutes, Elliston said. Elliston added Palantir gives the agency access to between 30 and 40 datasets.

Palantir generally doesn’t generate its own datasets; instead, its tools are broadly used to bring usually disparate datasets together and let them be queried as one.

In January, 404 Media revealed Palantir was working on a tool for ICE called ELITE, or Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. This tool populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person including their personal information, and provides a “confidence score” on that person’s current address. Those addresses came from various sources including the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) and Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR product, according to an ELITE user guide 404 Media obtained.

Palantir has worked with DHS, and specifically Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), for years. This work was previously focused on the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system, which HSI used. In the second Trump administration, Palantir became a “more mature partner to ICE,” the company said in a leaked Palantir wiki obtained by 404 Media.

Palantir’s closer work with ICE has triggered some protests around the country, including one in April outside Palantir’s offices in New York City.

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment for this article. The company previously wrote a blog post after 404 Media first revealed the existence of ELITE, writing, “The ELITE tool is used for prioritized enforcement to surface the likely addresses of specific individuals, such as those with final orders of removal or with high severity criminal charges.”

A DHS spokesperson told 404 Media in an email: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is committed to achieving the nation’s mandate to clear the backlog of illegal aliens who pose a threat to the security of our communities. Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests.”

Elliston also discussed Mobile Fortify, ICE and CBP’s facial recognition app. Elliston claimed the app has been used 200,000 times with a 0 percent mismatch rate. 404 Media reported in January that Mobile Fortify misidentified a woman, twice.

At one point, Elliston said that the agency has a lot of money and he’s open for business. If you want to show me something, send me a LinkedIn message, he said. After the session, one attendee said they watched as a huge line of people waited for their chance to speak to Elliston.

Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People

Internal Palantir Slack chats and message boards obtained by 404 Media show the contracting giant is helping find the location of people flagged for deportation, that Palantir is now a “more mature partner to ICE,” and how Palantir is addressing empl…

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

macfranc

2026-05-15 06:59:15

ATTENZIONE - Durante la giornata di oggi e di domani potrebbe verificarsi una temporanea interruzione di servizio del forum federato citiverse.it

Informiamo tutti gli utenti iscritti a Citiverse.it e a tutti gli altri utenti che utilizzano le categorie di Citiverse.it come "gruppi federati" dalle loro istanze Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed o Lemmy, che

durante la giornata di oggi e di domani potrebbe verificarsi una temporanea interruzione di servizio sul dominio citiverse.it

a causa del cambio di gestore del dominio.

Ci scusiamo per il disguido e ricordiamo che il problema non riguarderà le altre nostre tre istanze:

• poliverso.org: la nostra istanza Friendica
• feddit.it: la nostra istanza Lemmy, che con le sue comunità è da anni un punto di riferimento anche per gli utenti Mastodon
• poliversity.it: la nostra istanza Mastodon potenziata che consente di scrivere anche con testo formattato e senza lmitazione di caratteri

Quando il problema si sarà risolto, provvederemo a comunicarlo tempestivamente

@fediverso

macfranc

2026-05-15 06:59:15

ATTENZIONE - Durante la giornata di oggi e di domani potrebbe verificarsi una temporanea interruzione di servizio del forum federato citiverse.it

Informiamo tutti gli utenti iscritti a Citiverse.it e a tutti gli altri utenti che utilizzano le categorie di Citiverse.it come "gruppi federati" dalle loro istanze Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed o Lemmy, che

durante la giornata di oggi e di domani potrebbe verificarsi una temporanea interruzione di servizio sul dominio citiverse.it

a causa del cambio di gestore del dominio.

Ci scusiamo per il disguido e ricordiamo che il problema non riguarderà le altre nostre tre istanze:

• poliverso.org: la nostra istanza Friendica
• feddit.it: la nostra istanza Lemmy, che con le sue comunità è da anni un punto di riferimento anche per gli utenti Mastodon
• poliversity.it: la nostra istanza Mastodon potenziata che consente di scrivere anche con testo formattato e senza lmitazione di caratteri

Quando il problema si sarà risolto, provvederemo a comunicarlo tempestivamente

@fediverso

informapirata

2025-02-03 19:32:00

I Gruppi del Fediverso: un modo per incontrare altri utenti Mastodon, Friendica o Pixelfed in base ai loro interessi

Il Fediverso è un luogo fatto soprattutto di interazioni sociali ma rispetto ai social commerciali non è facilissimo trovare utenti che condividano i nostri stessi interessi. Ecco come giocarsi la carta dei “Gruppi”

informapirata.it/2025/02/03/i-…

#Calabria #Campania #comunità #Fediverso #Friendica #gruppi #Lemmy #Mastodon

informapirata.it/2025/02/03/i-…

I Gruppi del Fediverso: un modo per incontrare altri utenti Mastodon, Friendica o Pixelfed in base ai loro interessi

Il Fediverso è un luogo fatto soprattutto di interazioni sociali ma rispetto ai social commerciali non è facilissimo trovare utenti che condividano i…

^{informapirata}

404 Media

2026-05-14 18:00:56

DOGE Cuts Unleashed a Deadly Wave of Violence Across Africa, Study Finds

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The sudden shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by DOGE in 2025 is associated with a rise in violent conflicts across Africa, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Days into Donald Trump’s second term, his administration began rapidly dismantling USAID, which had, up until that point, been the world’s largest national humanitarian donor. Elon Musk, who spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency, announced that his team had fed the agency “into the woodchipper” in February 2025. Tracking models suggest the collapse of USAID may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths, of which 500,000 are children, and the cuts could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, according to a study published in February 2026.

Now, a team reports “the earliest evidence of the impact of cuts to USAID on the incidence of violent events” which suggests that “the radical cuts…led to an increase in conflict in the regions that received the most aid from the United States,” according to the new study.

“What we find is that with the USAID shutdown, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of violence, and the lethality of violence across nearly one thousand subnational administrative units across Africa,” said Austin L. Wright, study co-author and associate professor and director of strategic initiatives at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, in a call with 404 Media.

In regions that received the most support from USAID, the cuts were associated with a 6.5 percent probability of any conflict event, compared to regions that received no aid. To get a sense of the devastating impact of that statistic, here’s what the study reports:

“The probability of protests and riots was 10% greater, the number of conflict events increased by 10.6%, battle counts increased by 6.9%, and battle-related fatalities increased by 9.3%. Event-study analysis confirmed no preexisting differences in conflict trends between high- and low-exposure regions before the shutdown. Effects are of similar size, with a 12.3% relative increase in the number of conflict events.“

Between 2021 and 2024, USAID is estimated to have saved 91 million lives, about a third of which are children under 5 years old. The agency was created by John F. Kennedy in 1961 and, in the years preceding Trump’s shutdown of the agency, accounted for less than 1 percent of total U.S. federal spending.

The impact of aid on communities is complex and context-dependent. Aid may reduce conflicts in cases where the opportunity costs of violence are mitigated by an influx of resources, known as the “opportunity cost effect.” But aid can also fuel conflicts over the handling and distribution of those resources, known as the “rapacity effect.”

The collapse of USAID, which is unprecedented in its scale and speed, has produced the worst of both worlds, according to the new study.
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“When those funds rapidly go away, it's a shock to the opportunity cost, and now it becomes more and more attractive to participate in what we might call the unproductive part of the economy, which is participating in violence, engaging in crime, and other activities,” Wright said. “But because the shutdown was so rapid, it didn't really have an opportunity to bind on the rapacity effect, because it's not as if the bridges, roads, or full-on infrastructure went away. The things that individuals or groups might fight over were still present.”

“It’s a bit of a ticking time bomb, because you're both removing the conflict-reducing side of aid, while leaving behind the conflict-enhancing part of aid,” he added.

To quantify the impact of the cuts on violence, Wright and his colleagues examined the Geocoded Official Development Assistance Dataset (GODAD), which monitors geolocated information regarding foreign aid disbursements, alongside the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), which tracks violent events.

The overlapping datasets revealed macro-level patterns between aid distribution and violence in the wake of the cuts, including significant upticks of violence in areas that had previously received large amounts of aid, or where the population had less control over their government due to weaker executive constraints.

Moreover, this increase in conflict has persisted over the course of months and may continue in areas that fall into “conflict traps” defined by self-perpetuating cycles of violence.

These impacts are catastrophic for people who had relied on USAID, as evidenced by the estimated death tolls, and the increased risk of violent conflicts and upheavals. They also present new vulnerabilities for the United States and its allies. Though USAID had an altruistic mission, the agency also served as a vector of soft power and an early-warning system for tracking public health risks, like pandemics. The loss of the agency has already caused national security issues for the U.S., such as the seizure of discarded USAID supplies by Iran-backed Houthi groups in Yemen.

“Those insecurities don't stay where they're created; they travel,” Wright said. “That unfortunately means that the vulnerabilities that are being created at the moment will likely have long-run consequences of creating insecurity that directly impacts the safety of Americans.”

Moreover, Trump’s demolition of USAID prompted many allies in Europe to pull back on their own foreign aid, exacerbating the effects. Though other humanitarian organizations are struggling to mitigate the consequences, the loss of trust caused by the shutdown of USAID is likely permanent, with ominous long-term consequences.

“Even if you reactivated USAID and pretended as if it never went away, you can't reverse these effects because you've already communicated your bad faith behavior,” Wright said. “There is nothing quite like the reputational bomb of simply shutting down an agency, and what that does to the reputation that the U.S. might have if it ever wanted to reinitiate its interventions.”

“From the soft power lens, and a global lens, the reputational effects, I think, are tremendous and will create a bunch of wedges and inefficiencies,” he concluded. “If one simply wanted to restart USAID, it's going to cost much more to rebuild than simply the same budget all over again.”

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ACLED

ACLED is an independent, impartial conflict monitor providing realtime data and analysis for all violent conflict and protests in all countries and territories across the world.

^ACLED