‘It was designed for dictatorships’: Donald Trump just gave ICE one of the world’s most powerful cyber-weapons

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is about to get a whole lot more powerful. The Trump administration has just greenlit a contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-based company that makes one of the most advanced cyber-hacking tools in the world. The contract, which was originally signed under the Biden administration but was put on hold for review, gives ICE access to a powerful spyware called Graphite.

The All-Source Intelligence Substack newsletter said what makes this spyware so powerful is its ability to hack into literally any mobile phone and get past encrypted apps. When Graphite is successfully deployed against a target, it essentially takes over the device. This means that ICE can not only track a person’s location but also read their messages, look at their photos, and even access information from encrypted applications like WhatsApp and Signal. Plus, the software can turn a phone into a listening device by manipulating its recorder.

The original contract with Paragon, which is worth $2 million, was put on hold for a compliance review to make sure it followed an executive order that limits the US government’s use of spyware. That executive order, signed by the Biden administration, said that the US “shall not make operational use of commercial spyware that poses significant counterintelligence or security risks to the United States government or significant risks of improper use by a foreign government or foreign person”.

Trump is pushing something Biden warned Americans about

The Biden administration had even gone so far as to blacklist one of Paragon’s rivals, NSO Group. This is because the company had supplied foreign governments with spyware used to target journalists and activists.

Paragon, for its part, has tried to distance itself from NSO Group. The company claims that it only does business with democracies and has a “no tolerance policy” for any government client that uses its tools to target members of civil society, like journalists. However, Paragon also refuses to reveal who its clients are and says it doesn’t have insight into how its technology is being used against targets.

This is par for the course for a government that hires descendants of KGB agents and those who call for the death of cops who defend democracy. This stance is concerning, especially since there was a controversy in Italy where Paragon’s Graphite spyware was used to target 90 people, including journalists and members of civil society, in two dozen countries. After this was revealed, Paragon apparently broke off its ties with Italy.

Scott-Railton even said of the controversy in Italy that erupted last year, “Invasive, secret hacking power is corrupting. That’s why there’s a growing pile of spyware scandals in democracies, including with Paragon’s Graphite…” and that these “were designed for dictatorships, not democracies built on liberty and protection of individual rights.”

The US government has traditionally been cautious about using spyware made outside the country. A big reason for this is the risk of counterintelligence. As John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, puts it, “As long as the same mercenary spyware tech is going to multiple governments, there is a baked-in counterintelligence risk”.

Scott-Railton pointed out that if other countries have the same technology as the US, they would have special insight into how to detect what the US is doing. He also said that these tools were “designed for dictatorships, not democracies built on liberty and protection of individual rights”.

So, here we are with a contract that was put on hold is now moving forward, giving a powerful agency a new, incredibly invasive tool. While Paragon and other spyware makers say their products are meant to prevent crime and terrorist attacks, these tools have also been used against innocent people. Get ready to always be watched by the government.