ICE Is Paying a Controversial AI Firm to Hide the Identities of Agents
· The Intercept
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is launching a new “Doxing Mitigation Initiative” using AI to help ICE personnel keep their identities hidden from the public, according to an email addressed to all agency employees on Monday.
The memo, signed by Acting ICE Director David Venturella and leaked to The Intercept by ICE employees, identifies a company called ZeroFox as the tech firm behind the initiative. The communication describes ZeroFox as “a modernized protective technology solution designed to strengthen safeguards for our most valuable resource: You and your families.”
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The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, quietly entered a $15 million contract with ZeroFox in July for software licenses to support ICE operations and investigations, according to public procurement records. The records indicate that ZeroFox will provide services for the Office of Intelligence at ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division.
ZeroFox develops AI-driven software aimed at stopping data leaks across social media and the dark web, according to its website. “ZeroFox never stops finding, mapping, and monitoring your digital presence,” the company vows. It’s not clear from the contract or the internal email how, precisely, the new initiative will function, and neither ICE nor ZeroFox responded to requests for comment.
“It sounds like inside surveillance,” said an ICE official who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
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ZeroFox has used its tech in the past to identify and categorize people engaged in political activism, including during public unrest in Baltimore after the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The ICE official expressed concern that ZeroFox tech could now be used to weed out whistleblowers and critics of the Trump administration.
“If things go sideways they may just throw all your info out there, make you out to be the problem or dox you,” the official said. “I don’t trust it.”
According to Richard Forno, associate director of the cybersecurity institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, it’s not shocking that ICE would contract with AI companies that “may have checkered histories.”
“It’s plausible that this tech could be used to seek out whistleblowers,” Forno told The Intercept. “For example, if ICE internal affairs or leadership can seed information that gets leaked, and then that information is then passed along to a reporter, you’re kind of setting up a honey pot situation to figure out who the leakers are.” He pointed out that the White House has already set a precedent for targeting critics as “terrorists” or “extremists” on fairly broad terms.
In 2015, ZeroFox offered its services to Baltimore officials for free, sending Baltimore Police a list of “threat actors” identified by its social-media monitoring system, which classified peaceful BLM protest organizers as physical threats. (ZeroFox’s co-founders told the press at the time that the classifications were likely based on their social media follower counts, and that they were labeled “physical” because they were “acting in real life” rather than online.)
After the January 6 attack, the FBI struggled to identify online extremist activity using its recently acquired ZeroFox technology, which the bureau’s agents referred to with “a derisive nickname,” according to the Washington Post, that involved “replacing the ‘Fox’ with a similar-sounding expletive.”
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ZeroFox’s relationship with ICE, according to the leaked memo, seems to be focused on detecting information online that could identify or “dox” ICE employees. It’s understandable for a person to want to limit the personal information published about them online, said Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“However,” she said, “if ICE is instituting this program to shield officers and the agency itself from public accountability, especially when information is already publicly available, then that’s a serious concern and flies in the face of our democratic values.”
ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept said some ICE personnel already use third-party services to keep their information private.
“I frankly don’t trust the feds with that,” said a second ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept under anonymity to protect his livelihood. “I’m not really keen on giving my PII” — personally identifiable information — “to a company that doesn’t have a solid track record with government contracts.”
ZeroFox is owned by private equity firm Haveli Investments, which bought the company for roughly $350 million in 2024. Bryan Ware, a former assistant director for cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, currently serves as an executive at ZeroFox.
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