4 ms·

ICE Awards $25M Iris-Scanning Contract to Bi2 Technologies

172 points by cdrnsf 5mo ago

afavour 5mo ago
I’ll save you a click: yes, of course it was a no bid contract. And: > The procurement did not require the system to clear FedRAMP, the government’s security review for cloud systems handling sensitive data, before deployment. It described no independent audit, congressional notification or outside review of how the system would be used. I don’t know how the US charts a path back from all this. There are going to be so many breaches to fix.
- JohnMakin 5mo ago
  it’s over
- mikeyouse 5mo ago
  Torn between anger at all the incompetent chucklefucks getting rich off taxpayer money and gratitude at them bestowing these contracts on useless sycophants instead of competent organizations..
  - pryce 5mo ago
    I have a strong suspicion the rationale for how they select providers on will turn out to be kickbacks and self-dealing.
- black_13 5mo ago
  [dead]
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
  Technically you could already win contracts without all those things, there are like a thousand loopholes. FedRAMP in particular only really covers cloud hosting, there are other DoD standards you have to follow for more specific systems. And if the agency isn't DoD, I don't think they apply anyway. If we had a software building code that applied to digital infrastructure in general, the way building codes apply to buildings in general, and electrical codes apply to electrical installation in general, this wouldn't be an issue, because you'd need your shit together to make any software product. But nobody seems to mind companies making shit products and leaking all our data.
- era-epoch 5mo ago
  The current US administration is already on the multiple-decades level of cleanup, and looking at the political group nominally tasked with doing said cleanup, the more likely answer would seem to be "never".
- GolfPopper 5mo ago
  >I don’t know how the US charts a path back from all this. There isn't one. And the sooner we all come to terms with that, the better off we and posterity will be. The constitutional government of the United States failed long before January 20th, 2025. Chasing sunk costs on this scale as futile, even if the alternatives are terrifying. In my opinion, the best, just, course forward is a Constitutional Convention that dissolves the United States Government and replaces it with nothing. Let the states and territories govern themselves as they choose, and work out needed compacts and agreements going forward.
  - jadbox 5mo ago
    Boggles my mind you'd even imagine a positive scenario here. Let the states choose? This is not only how we kept slavery going by letting states drive, but it also caused a civic war when we had no federal coordination. Nay, we must reform and reclaim a just federal government. Letting states drive themselves will turn the country into extreme violence.
    - esseph 5mo ago
      The states should be free to choose their own course. Citizens should be allowed to move freely between them. May the best governance win.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - esseph 5mo ago
      > Letting states drive themselves will turn the country into extreme violence. Who days that doesn't happen now? Seems like wishful thinking.
  - myko 5mo ago
    He should've been locked up on January 7th. That was the death knell.
  - smallmancontrov 5mo ago
- Revanche1367 5mo ago
  There is no path back. Even if the next administration overturns ICE and its activities and dissolves all contracts related to them, there is no reason to think the US govt will not keep using any and all technologies or services obtained in the name of security, regardless of party, even if they have to do so with deep secrecy.
  - noir_lord 5mo ago
    Also nothing prevents Trump v2.0 in 4 years after that since all the conditions will still exist in 4 years. For anyone outside the US (including me), it's dismaying. It's not like any of us thought the US was perfect (at least those of who like history, no country is and the US has more issues than many) but they just straight took the wheel and swerved it into a wall.
- jmcgough 5mo ago
  How do we know there's any plan to accomplish this, and that this isn't just funneling $25M to a family member?
dweekly 5mo ago
This is their global headquarters. Yes, that appears to be the whole thing. https://www.google.com/maps/place/488+State+Rd+%231,+Plymouth,+MA+02360/@41.9251321,-70.5716972,3a,37.3y,25.8h,92.47t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s7FmgEzHoZH8qGmISdlbkIg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-2.4662043352165597%26panoid%3D7FmgEzHoZH8qGmISdlbkIg%26yaw%3D25.79596887075123!7i16384!8i8192!4m6!3m5!1s0x89e4b1aa843ea715:0x61b28416429c41db!8m2!3d41.9253158!4d-70.571556!16s%2Fg%2F11qg14m5qz?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/488+State+Rd+%231,+Plymout...
- huflungdung 5mo ago
  One dell power edge with a “do not unplug”
- SilverElfin 5mo ago
  Reminds me of this ICE contract for billion dollar detention facilities … to some random unknown company registered to a single family home with no working phone number or website https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/acquisition-logistics-ice-fort-bliss-detention-center-billion-dollar-contract/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/acquisition-log... This administration has had mass corruption and grift, taking from taxpayers and handing it to friends and family of Trump
  - tkel 5mo ago
    It's nothing new, the Pentagon has failed 8 audits in a row. In just one year (2022), $220 Billion dollars of their spending were totally unaccounted for.
    - cyanydeez 5mo ago
      that audit has nothing to do with the president of the united states enriching themselves and frieds. If you want to go look at that audit, the summary usually is: the DoD can't place a bunch of black money going to CIA programs to do whatever shit they get up to. It's not an equivalence of any merit.
bix6 5mo ago
Ryan Ballard strikes again.
black_13 5mo ago
[dead]
0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
So the police state has upgraded from papers to eyeballs
sneak 5mo ago
> The award describes the purchase as covering iris biometric recognition technology and access to a biometric information system "to allow ICE agents to quickly authenticate the identity of subjects during field operations." Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people. This is federal shock troops (masked and unidentified, at that) gearing up for mass scale human rights violations. They are already flying facial recognition drones at extremely low altitudes over sidewalks in downtown LA and other places.
- Borealid 5mo ago
  > Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people. Could you cite a source for this? If a law enforcement officer personally recognizes someone's face, I don't believe that it's illegal for them to know who the person is. If a law enforcement officer turns to their non-cop buddy and asks "do you know this person?" and their buddy says "yeah that's Joe", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way. If a law enforcement officer picks up a phone and describes the person's face to their non-cop buddy and the buddy says "that sounds like Joe's face you're describing", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way. You can see where this is going, right? At what point does it become illegal to look up a person's face in a store of the-way-faces-look? Where does that become the "forcible identification" you're talking about? Generally speaking, people expose their faces in public, and so those exposed faces can be remembered, photographed, and recalled without the person's consent or any warrant. This is legal in the USA - there is no expectation of privacy in a public space, and the police don't have to give you any more privacy than a private citizen would. They just cannot search you - and looking at your face, and potentially recognizing it, is not a search.
  - oyashirochama 5mo ago
    The only arguement I can see, is that the police should also not expect any privacy and have their names and faces visable, but thats the only relatively modern issue I've had. And maybe no database that is always on and always accessable state and federal wide, since thats removing just general public exposure expectation.
kumarski 5mo ago
I thought Altman's worldcoin was angling for this when they had people take photos of their eyeballs.... getting into the gov't contracting side of things.... surprises me some no-name company got it.
- zombot 5mo ago
  Altman's shitcoin has too much eye scanning and too few kickbacks.
kenjackson 5mo ago
I really don’t understand how so many people can support this admin. It’s not that I ideologically disagree with them, but they are so corrupt that they appear incompetent. They actually aren’t incompetent, they just don’t care about what is important to almost everyone else. If you, for example, don’t care about public safety or accountability it turns out you can make a lot of money.
- atty 5mo ago
  The federal government and the executive branch has a well specified set of responsibilities to the people of this country, and they are massively failing at just about every metric. So yes, they are truly incompetent.
  - jmcgough 5mo ago
    They aren't interested in those responsibilities, just enriching themselves and attacking their enemies.
- smallmancontrov 5mo ago
  Information bubbles are wicked. I'm visiting family over the long weekend and they are all convinced that Trump is a selfless holy crusader against fraud who is finding so much Democrat fraud that he deserves a little side action :|
  - ramraj07 5mo ago
    Thats not a bubble though, thats just Stockholm syndrome or genuine acceptance of this behavior as being acceptable or even perfect.
  - michaelmrose 5mo ago
    That's not just an information bubble it's stupidity sometimes but not always with a side order of racism. The entire notion of somehow deserving to be corrupt as well is an indication of not just being unethical but literally not understanding what ethics looks like. We have to come to terms with the idea that half of America is neither intelligent nor good people.
xxlrlmhl 5mo ago
[flagged]
whytevuhuni 5mo ago
Și

172 points by cdrnsf 5mo ago

I’ll save you a click: yes, of course it was a no bid contract. And: > The procurement did not require the system to clear FedRAMP, the government’s security review for cloud systems handling sensitive data, before deployment. It described no independent audit, congressional notification or outside review of how the system would be used. I don’t know how the US charts a path back from all this. There are going to be so many breaches to fix.

JohnMakin 5mo ago
it’s over
mikeyouse 5mo ago
Torn between anger at all the incompetent chucklefucks getting rich off taxpayer money and gratitude at them bestowing these contracts on useless sycophants instead of competent organizations..
- pryce 5mo ago
  I have a strong suspicion the rationale for how they select providers on will turn out to be kickbacks and self-dealing.
black_13 5mo ago
[dead]
0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
Technically you could already win contracts without all those things, there are like a thousand loopholes. FedRAMP in particular only really covers cloud hosting, there are other DoD standards you have to follow for more specific systems. And if the agency isn't DoD, I don't think they apply anyway. If we had a software building code that applied to digital infrastructure in general, the way building codes apply to buildings in general, and electrical codes apply to electrical installation in general, this wouldn't be an issue, because you'd need your shit together to make any software product. But nobody seems to mind companies making shit products and leaking all our data.
era-epoch 5mo ago
The current US administration is already on the multiple-decades level of cleanup, and looking at the political group nominally tasked with doing said cleanup, the more likely answer would seem to be "never".
GolfPopper 5mo ago
>I don’t know how the US charts a path back from all this. There isn't one. And the sooner we all come to terms with that, the better off we and posterity will be. The constitutional government of the United States failed long before January 20th, 2025. Chasing sunk costs on this scale as futile, even if the alternatives are terrifying. In my opinion, the best, just, course forward is a Constitutional Convention that dissolves the United States Government and replaces it with nothing. Let the states and territories govern themselves as they choose, and work out needed compacts and agreements going forward.
- jadbox 5mo ago
  Boggles my mind you'd even imagine a positive scenario here. Let the states choose? This is not only how we kept slavery going by letting states drive, but it also caused a civic war when we had no federal coordination. Nay, we must reform and reclaim a just federal government. Letting states drive themselves will turn the country into extreme violence.
  - esseph 5mo ago
    The states should be free to choose their own course. Citizens should be allowed to move freely between them. May the best governance win.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - esseph 5mo ago
    > Letting states drive themselves will turn the country into extreme violence. Who days that doesn't happen now? Seems like wishful thinking.
- myko 5mo ago
  He should've been locked up on January 7th. That was the death knell.
- smallmancontrov 5mo ago
Revanche1367 5mo ago
There is no path back. Even if the next administration overturns ICE and its activities and dissolves all contracts related to them, there is no reason to think the US govt will not keep using any and all technologies or services obtained in the name of security, regardless of party, even if they have to do so with deep secrecy.
- noir_lord 5mo ago
  Also nothing prevents Trump v2.0 in 4 years after that since all the conditions will still exist in 4 years. For anyone outside the US (including me), it's dismaying. It's not like any of us thought the US was perfect (at least those of who like history, no country is and the US has more issues than many) but they just straight took the wheel and swerved it into a wall.
jmcgough 5mo ago
How do we know there's any plan to accomplish this, and that this isn't just funneling $25M to a family member?

dweekly 5mo ago

This is their global headquarters. Yes, that appears to be the whole thing. https://www.google.com/maps/place/488+State+Rd+%231,+Plymouth,+MA+02360/@41.9251321,-70.5716972,3a,37.3y,25.8h,92.47t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s7FmgEzHoZH8qGmISdlbkIg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-2.4662043352165597%26panoid%3D7FmgEzHoZH8qGmISdlbkIg%26yaw%3D25.79596887075123!7i16384!8i8192!4m6!3m5!1s0x89e4b1aa843ea715:0x61b28416429c41db!8m2!3d41.9253158!4d-70.571556!16s%2Fg%2F11qg14m5qz?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/488+State+Rd+%231,+Plymout...

huflungdung 5mo ago
One dell power edge with a “do not unplug”
SilverElfin 5mo ago
Reminds me of this ICE contract for billion dollar detention facilities … to some random unknown company registered to a single family home with no working phone number or website https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/acquisition-logistics-ice-fort-bliss-detention-center-billion-dollar-contract/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/acquisition-log... This administration has had mass corruption and grift, taking from taxpayers and handing it to friends and family of Trump
- tkel 5mo ago
  It's nothing new, the Pentagon has failed 8 audits in a row. In just one year (2022), $220 Billion dollars of their spending were totally unaccounted for.
  - cyanydeez 5mo ago
    that audit has nothing to do with the president of the united states enriching themselves and frieds. If you want to go look at that audit, the summary usually is: the DoD can't place a bunch of black money going to CIA programs to do whatever shit they get up to. It's not an equivalence of any merit.

bix6 5mo ago

Ryan Ballard strikes again.

black_13 5mo ago

[dead]

0xbadcafebee 5mo ago

So the police state has upgraded from papers to eyeballs

sneak 5mo ago

> The award describes the purchase as covering iris biometric recognition technology and access to a biometric information system "to allow ICE agents to quickly authenticate the identity of subjects during field operations." Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people. This is federal shock troops (masked and unidentified, at that) gearing up for mass scale human rights violations. They are already flying facial recognition drones at extremely low altitudes over sidewalks in downtown LA and other places.

Borealid 5mo ago
> Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people. Could you cite a source for this? If a law enforcement officer personally recognizes someone's face, I don't believe that it's illegal for them to know who the person is. If a law enforcement officer turns to their non-cop buddy and asks "do you know this person?" and their buddy says "yeah that's Joe", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way. If a law enforcement officer picks up a phone and describes the person's face to their non-cop buddy and the buddy says "that sounds like Joe's face you're describing", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way. You can see where this is going, right? At what point does it become illegal to look up a person's face in a store of the-way-faces-look? Where does that become the "forcible identification" you're talking about? Generally speaking, people expose their faces in public, and so those exposed faces can be remembered, photographed, and recalled without the person's consent or any warrant. This is legal in the USA - there is no expectation of privacy in a public space, and the police don't have to give you any more privacy than a private citizen would. They just cannot search you - and looking at your face, and potentially recognizing it, is not a search.
- oyashirochama 5mo ago
  The only arguement I can see, is that the police should also not expect any privacy and have their names and faces visable, but thats the only relatively modern issue I've had. And maybe no database that is always on and always accessable state and federal wide, since thats removing just general public exposure expectation.

kumarski 5mo ago

I thought Altman's worldcoin was angling for this when they had people take photos of their eyeballs.... getting into the gov't contracting side of things.... surprises me some no-name company got it.

zombot 5mo ago
Altman's shitcoin has too much eye scanning and too few kickbacks.

kenjackson 5mo ago

I really don’t understand how so many people can support this admin. It’s not that I ideologically disagree with them, but they are so corrupt that they appear incompetent. They actually aren’t incompetent, they just don’t care about what is important to almost everyone else. If you, for example, don’t care about public safety or accountability it turns out you can make a lot of money.

atty 5mo ago
The federal government and the executive branch has a well specified set of responsibilities to the people of this country, and they are massively failing at just about every metric. So yes, they are truly incompetent.
- jmcgough 5mo ago
  They aren't interested in those responsibilities, just enriching themselves and attacking their enemies.
smallmancontrov 5mo ago
Information bubbles are wicked. I'm visiting family over the long weekend and they are all convinced that Trump is a selfless holy crusader against fraud who is finding so much Democrat fraud that he deserves a little side action :|
- ramraj07 5mo ago
  Thats not a bubble though, thats just Stockholm syndrome or genuine acceptance of this behavior as being acceptable or even perfect.
- michaelmrose 5mo ago
  That's not just an information bubble it's stupidity sometimes but not always with a side order of racism. The entire notion of somehow deserving to be corrupt as well is an indication of not just being unethical but literally not understanding what ethics looks like. We have to come to terms with the idea that half of America is neither intelligent nor good people.

xxlrlmhl 5mo ago

[flagged]

whytevuhuni 5mo ago

Și