Mastodon Feed
Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
jamey@toot.cat ("Jamey Sharp") wrote:
I love that hackers extracted and published information about thousands of Department of Homeland Security contracts (https://ddosecrets.org/article/ice-contracts) and I love the website that @micahflee built to explore that data set (https://micahflee.github.io/ice-contracts/).
However, I think it's important to understand that this dataset is exclusively research grants, not the contracts with companies like Palantir or Flock. Also, these are not all ICE contracts; they're from all across DHS, of which ICE is only one part. They're also not all currently active: the dataset includes contracts which ended over 20 years ago.
DHS has funded a lot of research projects, some of which I think were even good. So for any company or university you see in this dataset, I suggest digging deeper into what they actually did before deciding they're evil just by association. There certainly are mass surveillance projects and so on in this list, but there are also projects to make 911 calls reliable for people with VoIP phones, and a wide variety of other research.