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The US Department of Justice issued an opinion authorizing a federal hiring approach that allows technologists from private companies to work in government roles while remaining employed by their firms and retaining unvested equity (e.g., restricted stock units). The arrangement is tied to the administration’s U.S. Tech Force program, which plans to onboard managers from more than 20 companies; ethics experts raised concerns that such dual-employment and deferred-compensation structures could create conflicts of interest and weaken public-interest safeguards.
Separately, the US Department of Homeland Security reassigned or removed multiple career Customs and Border Protection officials involved in privacy and FOIA compliance after they objected to directives to withhold or relabel records about surveillance technologies. Reporting indicates DHS leadership ordered routine compliance documents—such as Privacy Threshold Analyses (PTAs)—to be treated as legally privileged or labeled as “drafts” to limit disclosure, following the release of a PTA that revealed details about Mobile Fortify, a previously undisclosed face recognition app that could capture faces and fingerprints without consent.
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The Office of Personnel Management said the U.S. Tech Force is explicitly recruiting cybersecurity personnel as part of its initial cohort, alongside software engineers, data scientists, and product managers. An agency spokesperson said cyber hires would be included in the first group of roughly 1,000 planned hires as participating agencies near the end of hiring.
The Justice Department issued an opinion allowing private-sector technologists to work in the federal government while remaining employed by their companies and keeping unvested restricted stock units. The decision cleared the way for the Trump administration's U.S. Tech Force program to recruit managers from more than 20 firms under recusal-based ethics assumptions.
Multiple career CBP officials were reassigned after they challenged directives to mislabel surveillance-technology privacy compliance records and limit their release under FOIA. Critics described the orders as illegal retaliation, while DHS denied having a policy that made PTAs categorically FOIA-exempt.
On December 3, the DHS Privacy Office announced a "major change" requiring future Privacy Threshold Analyses to carry disclaimers asserting deliberative-process and attorney-client privilege and restricting external sharing. Sources said officials were also directed to label signed privacy assessments as drafts to support FOIA withholding.
A CBP FOIA officer released a redacted Privacy Threshold Analysis that exposed details of the previously undisclosed Mobile Fortify face-recognition app. The document said DHS expected the app to collect faces and fingerprints without consent, include U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, and retain images for up to 15 years.
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Senior US officials and lawmakers are escalating oversight and policy debates around **surveillance authorities and intelligence handling**. The White House confirmed it will convene a high-level meeting with senior national security leaders and key members of Congress to discuss reauthorizing **FISA Section 702**, which is set to lapse without congressional action; the authority enables warrantless targeting of foreigners’ communications but can incidentally collect Americans’ communications, fueling renewed civil-liberties and warrant-requirement disputes. Separately, Director of National Intelligence **Tulsi Gabbard** is facing scrutiny on multiple fronts, including a **whistleblower complaint** alleging unusual restrictions on dissemination of highly classified NSA-derived intelligence and claims she directed the NSA not to publish a report and instead route details to her office; Gabbard’s office denies wrongdoing and says her actions were lawful, while the underlying complaint remains highly classified. Parallel oversight pressure is also building around **domestic-facing security and data practices**. The DHS Office of Inspector General launched an audit into how DHS components—initially focusing on **ICE** and the **Office of Biometric Identity Management**—collect, manage, share, and secure **PII and biometric data** used in immigration enforcement, following lawmakers’ concerns about facial recognition and license-plate data collection. In a separate but related governance controversy, Gabbard’s expanded involvement in **election security**—including participation around an FBI raid of a local elections office and actions involving voting systems that her team said had cybersecurity vulnerabilities—has raised questions about mandate boundaries between foreign-interference missions and domestic election administration. In contrast, the CIA’s announcement of a new acquisition framework to speed technology adoption is primarily an internal modernization/procurement change and does not materially advance the surveillance/oversight storyline beyond general national-security context.
Jun 29, 2026
The **Department of Homeland Security** and the **FBI** are expanding use of commercially available surveillance and data-tracking capabilities, prompting renewed scrutiny over privacy, civil liberties, and oversight. DHS is reportedly preparing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance technology in 2026, including a **$1 billion** blanket purchase agreement with *Palantir* and additional investments in AI-enabled monitoring, mobile tracking, and tools from vendors such as *Cellebrite* and *Paragon Solutions*. Advocacy groups and lawmakers have warned that these programs broaden the government’s ability to scan faces, track cell phone activity, and monitor both immigrants and U.S. citizens while governance mechanisms fail to keep pace. The **FBI** separately confirmed it has resumed buying Americans’ location and other commercially available data from brokers, reviving a practice the bureau had previously said it was not actively pursuing. Director **Kash Patel** told lawmakers the agency uses purchased data in ways it says are consistent with the Constitution and the **Electronic Communications Privacy Act**, while Sen. **Ron Wyden** characterized the practice as a warrantless workaround to Fourth Amendment protections. Reporting on DHS also indicates declining transparency, with Privacy Impact Assessment filings falling sharply and the department’s inspector general accusing the agency of obstructing audits tied to biometric data management and immigration enforcement, reinforcing concerns that federal surveillance capabilities are growing faster than meaningful oversight.
Jun 29, 2026
US lawmakers and civil-liberties advocates are escalating scrutiny of **ICE** and **CBP** use of facial recognition amid reports that immigration agents have used face-scanning tools on people observing or protesting enforcement activity. Proposed legislation dubbed the **“ICE Out of Our Faces Act”** would seek to bar ICE/CBP facial recognition use, alongside related demands to limit tracking of First Amendment activity and questions about whether ICE maintains a “domestic terrorists” database tied to immigration protests. Separately, records reviewed by *WIRED* indicate DHS’s *Mobile Fortify* facial-recognition app—rolled out in 2025 to “determine or verify” identities during operations—cannot reliably **verify** identity and is intended at best to generate investigative leads; the reporting also describes DHS approving the tool after weakening centralized privacy reviews and removing department-wide limits on facial recognition. In parallel, Congress is debating the renewal of **FISA Section 702**, with lawmakers raising concerns that domestic surveillance authorities could be applied more broadly, including in support of immigration-related enforcement framed as a national security issue. Nextgov reports that transparency data shows intelligence agencies increased 702 searches in 2024 using identifiers linked to known or suspected Americans while pursuing foreign cyber and terrorism threats, even as the FBI reduced its own direct U.S.-person queries after new safeguards. A separate Nextgov item on an AI moratorium and sector-specific AI regulation is policy-focused and not directly tied to the ICE/CBP facial recognition deployments or Section 702 reauthorization debate described in the other reporting.
Jun 29, 2026