The budget bill opens the floodgates for state surveillance tech and bad AI

Silicon Valley wins big in the accelerated authoritarianism of Trump's beautiful bill

Hello out there,

Another week, another fusillade of grim news, at least stateside here. Hope folks can take the 4th of July holiday weekend to recharge and get out to the beach or the lake or wherever. I’m certainly going to. In fact, I’m embarking on a long-planned family trip—I have a draft of a piece that’s in decent shape that I may try to schedule for next week, but if I don’t wrap it in time, hope everyone can cut me some slack for taking the time off. I may take inspiration from what my pals at 404 Media did this week and log all the way off. And speaking of family: My 9 year-old son just recommended a book to me for the first time. He brought me “Dog Man: The Scarlet Shredder” and said “dad, I think you’ll like this, it’s about an AI army that tries to take over the world and the good guys stop them.” What can I say? He gets me.¹

Thanks as always to everyone who reads and supports this work—and an extra-massive thanks to everyone who chips in a little each month so I can keep the lights on. You make it possible for me to do things like take some days off with the fam. If you too would like to make such things possible, and you’re able, consider upgrading to a paid subscription so I can continue training the next generation of AI critics. Cheers, and onwards.

So the House of Representatives has passed the big bill, which means it’s headed to Trump’s desk where he will adorn it with a loping signature and smile for a photo op like he’s at the grand opening of a used car lot. Thanks to said bill, tax cuts for the rich will be extended and made permanent, 12 million Americans will be kicked off their insurance, food assistance programs will be gutted, and ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies will be given many billions of dollars. (The smallest of comforts is knowing that the 10-year AI law ban once lodged in it is dead.)

The bill allocates $45 billion for “immigration detention capacity,” $31 billion to fund ICE operations, $13 billion for state and local grants and $6.3 for “border surveillance technology.” There’s also $66 billion for Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), for personnel and digital infrastructure.

There is, in other words, a record-breaking store of federal funds dedicated to policing, detaining, and deporting people who live in this country. As has widely been pointed out, this bill makes ICE the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the country by a significant margin. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council notes that ICE now has “more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.”

And here is one thing that you can bet with 100% certitude that those agencies will do with that money: Purchase high-tech “AI-powered” systems for surveilling, monitoring, and tracking the nation’s population, in the name of ferreting out non-citizens.

The betting part is cheating a little bit, because ICE and CBP et al already have large contracts with tech companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Cellebrite to do exactly that. But this budget bill has opened the floodgates in a way that the tech companies willing to operate in this space have only dreamed of. With tens of billions of dollars to spend by 2029, when much of the funding is to be cut off—and the Trump administration closer than ever to Silicon Valley—I think we can expect to see a good deal of it invested in AI and surveillance systems whose manufacturers promise to expedite and accelerate Trump’s deportation program.

In fact, that’s already what’s happening.

On the same day that news broke of the budget bill’s passage, WIRED’s Caroline Haskins published a story about how the CBP “is asking tech companies to pitch digital forensics tools that are designed to process and analyze text messages, pictures, videos, and contacts from seized phones, laptops, and other devices at the United States border.”

There’s more:

The agency said in a federal registry listing that the tools it’s seeking must have very specific capabilities, such as the ability to find a “hidden language” in a person’s text messages; identify specific objects, “like a red tricycle,” across different videos; access chats in encrypted messaging apps; and “find patterns” in large datasets for “intel generation.” The listing was first posted on June 20 and updated on July 1.

CBP has been using Cellebrite to extract and analyze data from devices since 2008. But the agency said that it wants to “expand” and modernize its digital forensics program. Last year, CBP claims, it did searches on more than 47,000 electronic devices—which is slightly higher than the approximately 41,500 devices it searched in 2023 but a dramatic rise from 2015, when it searched just more than 8,500 devices.

With $66 billion in funding, expect the CBP to be able to scan a lot more devices than 50,000 a year.

Over at Tech Policy Press, Jai Dulani highlights how the bill is a gift to big tech:

This budget reveals the intersection at which the anti-immigrant Right and the tech Right converge. Under the version of the bill headed to the president’s desk, US Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) 2024 budget of $23 billion would nearly triple. Some portion of this supplemental funding, which is estimated to exceed $60 billion, would result in bigger contracts to surveillance technology corporations. An additional $2.8 billion is allocated for “other surveillance technologies” along the southwest, northern, and maritime borders. This may include an expansion of the “surveillance towers” operated by Anduril Industries. Anduril was founded by Trump supporter Palmer Luckey, who has raked in billions of dollars worth of contracts since Trump took office.

Some $700 million is earmarked for ICE’s “information technology investments to support enforcement and removal operations,” Dulani notes—the kind of contracts that have been held by Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale’s (both ardent Trump supporters) Palantir through the last two administrations. Dulani continues:

The bill provides $6.2 billion for border technology and screening, which includes the deployment of biometric technology. Information derived from facial recognition, iris scans, and DNA will be collected and fed into DHS’ centralized biometric repository, the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). IDENT is accessed not only by ICE, but also the Department of Justice (DOJ) and state and local law enforcement. This data will be used for tracking, profiling, and policing, despite an abundance of documentation of the ways in which this technology does not work; it infamously misidentifies people, especially people of color, leading to wrongful arrests and detentions.

These investitures will necessarily expand the surveillance of *everyone* not just migrants, and that immigration surveillance is just one piece of the pie. The Department of Defense stands to receive its biggest budget in history, and may ultimately wind up with more than $1 trillion. Dulani concludes that “this bill makes one thing crystal clear: corporate-state collusion is accelerating, threatening to fully convert the US into an authoritarian state.”

And Silicon Valley companies are playing a central role. Google runs AI and cloud services to the US military. OpenAI inked a $200 million defense contract just weeks ago. Executives at Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir have officially enlisted in the US Army as part of its innovation initiative. Anthropic, Palantir, and Amazon partnered to sell AI tools to the federal government for intelligence and defense operations. The list goes on.

Ten years ago, any of those items would have caused some blowback and even outrage—Google faced protests and open revolt among its employees when it announced that it was becoming a defense contractor in 2018, during the first Trump term. Now, big tech is open about collaborating with an administration that is building out state capacity for surveillance, policing, and mass deportation. Most gave money to Trump’s inauguration fund, they’ve paid personal visits to Mar-A-Lago, they campaigned to pass a bill that would have banned states from legislating or regulating their AI products.

We can only begin to imagine the new scope of state-sponsored AI surveillance tools and inter-agency databases and facial recognition technologies that this new budgetary largesse, and a Silicon Valley unafraid of capitalizing on it, will beget. One slim consolation is that a lot of them will be useless. Many new contracts will go to over-promising opportunists and grifters who spin up companies and divisions to get in on the budgetary gold rush. Many projects will suffer rampant dysfunction and mismanagement. Many won’t get off the ground. Many of the AI tools simply won’t work as advertised, in the same ways that many AI tools do not work as advertised in many other fields and capacities.

But this is the smallest consolation. As readers of this newsletter know, it often will not matter whether AI or automation tools work well or at all—they nonetheless can be used to justify more expansive dragnets to scoop up, administer, and weaponize our data and more aggressive intrusions into our daily lives. They will offer their administrators an avenue through which to dodge accountability; ‘it was not the state that accidentally flagged someone for deportation, it was the AI.’ And so on.

I think it’s not hyperbole to say that what we’re witnessing is a radical restructuring of the American state. DOGE’s hollowing out of nonpartisan civil servants, the administration’s attacks on universities, and the wealth transfer are severe enough, but the formation of a new and extraordinarily financed paramilitary force, the erection of detention centers for migrants on US soil, the drive to “de-naturalize” US citizens; these are new authoritarian frontiers not so vigorously explored ever in my lifetime. And the Silicon Valley giants, which, I might add, have spent the last decades collecting and storing data on every user in the nation, are demonstrating enthusiasm for abetting the project. The floodgates are open.

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Extra Bloody bits:

I’m a talking head in this short More Perfect Union documentary about how Silicon Valley is using AI to concentrate power, along with my colleague at AI Now, Sarah Myers West, and some other very smart folks. It’s a good doc, and very much worth watching in full:

Thanks to everyone who has sent in more AI Killed My Jobs stories—so many good ones. I’m narrowing down which industry or profession(s) to do next, and it’s tough, for a lot of reasons. But seriously, really appreciate everyone’s candor, wisdom, and perspective. Keep them coming; address is AIKilledMyJob@pm.me.

Expect the next installment in a couple weeks. Oh and keep an eye out for an abridged version of the last one that the Guardian is aiming to run next week. They’re co-publishing the piece, which should help get more eyes on everyone’s stories, and further spread the word about what management, executives, and their AI initiatives are doing to workers in the tech world—and to the industry in general.

Okay okay, That’s it for now—see you next week, or the week after, if I run out of gas. Hang in there everyone, and hammers up.

1. I would like to note that I originally intended to add “he’s the best” here, but he came in and saw me writing this and said that part was too embarrassing and I had to delete it so I’m hiding it down here.