US Lawmakers Move to Kill the FBI's Warrantless Wiretap Access A bipartisan bill would force the FBI to get a warrant to read Americans' messages and ban the federal purchase of commercial data on US residents ahead of a critical April deadline. A bipartisan privacy coalition in the United States Congress introduced legislation on Thursday that would impose a strict warrant requirement on the FBI's backdoor searches of Americans' communications, aligning federal law with a 2025 federal court ruling that found the warrantless practice unconstitutional. The bill, the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2026, repeals controversial expansions of the government's warrantless wiretapping authority while overhauling key aspects of federal surveillance law--setting up a showdown with the US intelligence community and its congressional allies weeks before a sweeping global spy program sunsets on April 20. Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Lee are leading the legislative push alongside Representatives Warren Davidson and Zoe Lofgren. The measure carries endorsements from civil liberties organizations across the political spectrum.

"If you are interested in helping shape and deliver the next chapter of Palantir's work across DHS, please reach out," a Palantir executive wrote to employees about the massive purchasing agreement. The Department of Homeland Security struck a $1 billion purchasing agreement with Palantir last week, further reinforcing the software company's role in the federal agency that oversees the nation's immigration enforcement . According to contracting documents published last week, the blanket purchase agreement (BPA) awarded "is to provide Palantir commercial software licenses, maintenance, and implementation services department wide." The agreement simplifies how DHS buys software from Palantir, allowing DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to essentially skip the competitive bidding process for new purchases of up to $1 billion in products and services from the company. Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

US Border Patrol intelligence units will gain access to a face recognition tool built on billions of images scraped from the internet. United States Customs and Border Protection plans to spend $225,000 for a year of access to Clearview AI, a face recognition tool that compares photos against billions of images scraped from the internet . The deal extends access to Clearview tools to Border Patrol's headquarters intelligence division (INTEL) and the National Targeting Center, units that collect and analyze data as part of what CBP calls a coordinated effort to "disrupt, degrade, and dismantle" people and networks viewed as security threats. The contract states that Clearview provides access to "over 60+ billion publicly available images" and will be used for "tactical targeting" and "strategic counter-network analysis," indicating the service is intended to be embedded in analysts' day-to-day intelligence work rather than reserved for isolated investigations. CBP says its intelligence units draw from a "variety of sources," including commercially available tools and publicly available data, to identify people and map their connections for national security and immigration operations.

Plus: Apple's Lockdown mode keeps the FBI out of a reporter's phone, Elon Musk's Starlink cuts off Russian forces, and more. An analysis by WIRED this week found that ICE and CBP's face recognition app Mobile Fortify, which is being used to identify people across the United States, isn't actually designed to verify who people are and was only approved for Department of Homeland Security use by relaxing some of the agency's own privacy rules. WIRED took a close look at highly militarized ICE and CBP units that use extreme tactics typically seen only in active combat. Two agents involved in the shooting deaths of US citizens in Minneapolis are reportedly members of these paramilitary units. And a new report from the Public Service Alliance this week found that data brokers can fuel violence against public servants, who are facing more and more threats but have few ways to protect their personal information under state privacy laws.

The campaign is among the largest anti-ICE protests by workers at a single company since federal agents shot and killed two people in Minneapolis last month. More Than 880 employees and contractors working for Google signed a petition this week calling on the company to disclose and cancel any contracts it may have with US immigration authorities . In the letter unveiled on Friday, the workers said they are "vehemently opposed" to Google's dealings with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). "We object to the technology we build being used to power state violence around the world," a Google software engineer, who declined to give their name out of fear of retaliation, told reporters on Friday. "I stand to benefit from other people's suffering, which I find abhorrent and I refuse to be a quiet participant in that system," added a second Google staffer, who went by Alex. Google declined to comment on the petition's demands.

ICE and CBP's Face-Recognition App Can't Actually Verify Who People Are ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that--and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules. The face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show. DHS explicitly linked the rollout to an executive order, signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, which called for a "total and efficient" crackdown on undocumented immigrants through the use of expedited removals, expanded detention, and funding pressure on states, among other tactics. Despite DHS repeatedly framing Mobile Fortify as a tool for identifying people through facial recognition, however, the app does not actually "verify" the identities of people stopped by federal immigration agents--a well-known limitation of the technology and a function of how Mobile Fortify is designed and used.

After 9/11, the U.S. enforced stricter control on immigration. This enforcement led to the birth of Homeland Security and ICE, but what is ICE exactly? SAN FRANCISCO – Hundreds of Google employees are calling on the company to pledge it won't work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A group of employees called Googlers for Human Rights posted a public petition urging the company not to bid on a cloud computing contract for CBP, the federal agency that oversees law enforcement for the country's borders. Bids for the contract were due Aug. 1.