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- Google, Amazon, and Microsoft reps showed up to a packed industry day for ICE's RAVEn technology.
- The tool taps thousands of sources, including surveillance footage, biometric and social-media data.
- Contracts for the program are worth up to $300 million, according to documents obtained by Insider.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have shown interest in working on a system being developed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that targets people not authorized to work in the US by mining social-media information, and processing surveillance footage and biometric data, according to interviews and documents obtained by Insider.
Earlier this year, representatives from the three tech giants attended an industry day arranged by ICE to discuss the little-known investigative analytics tool called RAVEn. By the end of September, ICE is scheduled to award three contracts, worth up to $300 million in total, to companies that will build and maintain the system through 2025.
RAVEn, abbreviated from Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment, ingests data from tens of thousands of sources, then makes it searchable, shareable between agents, and graphable by values like time and place, according to an ICE document obtained by Insider.
More than 500 people and over 200 other companies, such as IBM, Cellebrite, Dell, Nokia, Snowflake, and Splunk, showed up to the April event, according to an attendee list.
Amazon Web Services sent three reps, including Sean O'Donnell, a senior account executive who previously worked with the Department of Homeland Security at Microsoft and IBM's Red Hat. Microsoft had five in attendance, including Alison Plotas, an Azure cloud specialist focused on the DHS market. Google Cloud sent Curt Grifo, a DHS account executive who used to work for Oracle's federal cloud business.
It's unclear whether Amazon, Google, or Microsoft will get any of these contracts, or whether they will be tapped as subcontractors or cloud providers to the winners. But their involvement is likely to stir unrest among some employees and increase concern from immigration-rights activists. AWS is already being used in RAVEn, according to multiple documents reviewed by Insider.
Workers from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have previously protested their employers' ties to ICE and US Customs and Border Protection. In 2019, a group of Amazon employees called on the company to stop working with Palantir, a big data company that has a big ICE contract. That same year, more than 1,000 Googlers urged the internet giant not to bid on a CBP cloud contract.
RAVEn may be particularly controversial because of the breadth and depth of information it will scoop up to track down and, in some cases, possibly arrest or deport people who are not authorized to work in the US. Paromita Shah, the executive director of the immigrants' rights organization Just Futures Law, said she was troubled that an early version of the system was already being used to automate the processing of some deportation forms.
Microsoft declined to comment. Amazon, Google, and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.
RAVEn data sources include "publicly available information from the internet," as well as "non-public online information," sometimes from "private sector partners." This means surveillance photos and videos, biometric data like fingerprints, location and financial data obtained from private companies, information from social media, and official government documents like passports and visas, according to an industry-day presentation viewed by Insider and a privacy impact assessment for RAVEn.
The tool mines information about everyone, including "non-immigrants, immigrants, U.S. citizens, or lawful permanent residents," one of the documents says. Officers from Homeland Security Investigations and other law-enforcement agencies can use RAVEn to look for evidence of illegality in immigration documents, identify criminal networks, map connections between suspects, and build cases against people.
The system has been partially operational since 2018, but it's scheduled to reach initial operating capacity, or the minimum version of RAVEn that meets the program's needs, by Sept. 30. ICE has already used RAVEn to check thousands of immigration documents, according to a 2021 budget document.
Do you have information about RAVEn, the bidding process, or another government contract Insider should know about? Contact this reporter at chaskins@insider.com or caroline.haskins@protonmail.com, or via secure messaging app Signal, using a non-work device, at +1 (785) 813-1084.
This is the latest example of a multiyear investment from the Department of Homeland Security in surveillance databases and programs. Last year, DHS began spending more than $4 billion to create its own biometric database, HART, to replace an existing system.
Booz Allen Hamilton, DirectViz Solutions, and KCI Acuity have been working on RAVEn since 2018. They were awarded contracts for development, security, and operations; data analytics; and user interface and experience, respectively. These contracts are up for rebidding now.
Multiple people who attended the RAVEn industry day told Insider that the incumbent vendors had an advantage because they were already familiar with the tool. The contracts for DevSecOps and data analytics, however, are very competitive.
"It's like a frenzy," one person who attended the event said. "There's a lot of people trying to see if they can unseat Booz Allen." The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive topics.
Miranda Collins, a contracting officer for ICE, said the agency had "much more" than the minimum of three bidders required by law. She declined to identify those companies.
The latest RAVEn contracts are worth a lot more than they were in 2018. Booz Allen Hamilton, DirectViz, and KCI Acuity earned $25.5 million, $9.3 million, and $7.9 million, respectively, for their 2018 contracts. Those contracts are now worth between $50 million and $100 million each, according to documents obtained by Insider. That's lured more larger companies.
"If the dollars are there, we go after those opportunities," one person who attended the industry day told Insider.
Even if a company doesn't win a contract, it can still get paid to work on RAVEn as a subcontractor doing work for the main or "prime" contractor. Cloud-computing providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft can also get involved through reseller programs where partners market and integrate their services. For instance, Booz Allen Hamilton is a certified reseller for AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Booz Allen Hamilton declined to comment. DirectViz and KCI Acuity did not respond to requests for comment.
According to an ICE budget document for 2021, RAVEn has already processed more than 780,000 I-213 documents, which are personal-history forms that ICE agents or Border Patrol officers fill out when they take someone into custody. They can be a deciding factor in whether a person is deported.
Shah from Just Futures Law said it was troubling that RAVEn was automating the processing of I-213s. ICE officers routinely lie and make basic errors on these forms, The Intercept reported in 2019. "I-213s are really just taking a snapshot of whatever is in an ICE agent or officer's brain," Shah said. RAVEn "puts the veneer of objectivity over the I-213, which it does not deserve," she added.
RAVEn has also processed more than 55,000 I-9 employment documents from 16 workplace audits, looking for evidence of people who don't have the legal status to work. Last year, ICE arrested 1,001 people as a result of I-9 inspections, but it's unclear how many arrests and deportations may have resulted from RAVEn since 2018.
Workplace-document examinations are likely going to be part of RAVEn's remit, Fred Sherman, a senior director at BryTech who attended the industry day, said.
"The bigger part is dealing with the immigration status of individuals trying to get asylum status in the US. I think that's probably the biggest generative load that they have to deal with," he added.
RAVEn has four main components: RAVEn Core, a desktop tool; RAVEn Go, a mobile app; RAVEn Hub Graph, a data fusion and graphing tool; and a "Live Streaming and Social Media Analysis" tool, which ICE said would be used to investigate child exploitation and crimes against children.
Over the next year, ICE wants RAVEn to launch a feature that will "transcribe audio files containing human speech." This could be used to transcribe surveillance videos, or "audio or video recordings of interviews conducted by HSI special agents," according to one of the documents obtained by Insider.
Some of RAVEn's functionalities appear to overlap with an ICE tool called Falcon, which is a customized version of Palantir's Gotham software. The main difference is that RAVEn is being built for ICE from the ground up. It's unclear under which circumstances RAVEn would be used as opposed to Falcon, and vice versa.
Palantir did not attend the RAVEn industry day, but that doesn't mean the company won't bid on a RAVEn contract. KCI Acuity, an incumbent vendor, also didn't show up, but multiple people who were there said it was expected to rebid. Palantir did not answer Insider's questions about Falcon, and whether the company is involved with RAVEn.
Attending an industry day event almost always indicates interest in a contract — whether that's as a prime contractor, subcontractor, or a company trying to resell cloud services through a partner. Other companies that showed up included Thomson Reuters, and the military contractors Boeing and Raytheon. Thomson Reuters said it wouldn't pursue a RAVEn contract.
Do you have information about FALCON, or any of Palantir's work with ICE and DHS? Contact this reporter at chaskins@insider.com or caroline.haskins@protonmail.com, or via secure messaging app Signal, using a non-work device, at +1 (785) 813-1084.
Disclosure: Palantir Technologies CEO Alexander Karp is a member of Axel Springer's shareholder committee. Axel Springer owns Insider Inc, Business Insider's parent company.
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