Huge Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Staff—Together with Undercover ICE Brokers
DHS and DOJ didn’t reply to WIRED’s request for remark. The FBI referred WIRED’s inquiry to DHS.
According to a WIRED evaluation of the info, CBP staffers account for greater than half of the information. ICE accounts for about 10,000, roughly a 3rd of them in Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative wing. Another 6,200 belong to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and almost 1,000 are tied to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, greater than half of them contractors. Altogether, the recordsdata cowl a couple of seventh of DHS’s workforce, revealing how DHS is structured, from senior management right down to particular person immigration brokers and detention contractors.
Like most giant organizations, DHS makes use of permission teams to manage entry to inner programs, in accordance with the leaked information. Nearly everybody named within the leak has entry to a minimum of a few of these programs. At HSI, 39 staff throughout greater than a dozen area places of work belong to teams whose names embody “CUC,” which authorities court docket filings say stands for “licensed undercover operation.” Another group, apparently primarily based in HSI’s St. Paul, Minnesota space of operations, references “Keyhole,” which federal court docket filings describe as an authorized undercover operation that lately funded HSI’s undercover surveillance of Minneapolis protest groups earlier this 12 months. Others reference a “Communications Intercept Center TechOps (CICTO) Program,” a “Title III Intercept Program” for wiretaps, and an “Illicit Sensor Intercept Program (ISIP).”
The names of the teams—there are over 55,000 in all—seem to reference instruments for accessing immigration court docket information, pulling knowledge from seized telephones, and conducting surveillance. These embody Palantir’s Falcon investigative platform and PenLink, which analyzes cellphone information and social media.
Two permission teams, named “Executive Leadership” and “AI Access,” seem to record folks given exceptions to DHS’s internet filter, which blocks some web sites for workers. They comprise the identical 13 folks, together with former DHS head Kristi Noem; Antoine McCord, the lately departed DHS chief info officer who has returned to defense tech company Anduril; Philip Hegseth, listed as a senior advisor to the DHS secretary and the youthful brother of protection secretary Pete Hegseth; and Jayce Krachenfels, listed as a coverage adviser, who beforehand labored as a regional area director for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential marketing campaign, in accordance with his LinkedIn profile.
