Federal contracting records and a county business listing connect a Falls Church mailing address to a roughly $1.47 million ICE intelligence contract for Silo licenses, though the News-Press found no evidence of wrongdoing by the contractor. There’s also a tool ICE bought that can watch phones across whole neighborhoods, and an ICE legal analysis concluded it needs no warrant, according to 404 Media. And in one Homeland Security test, a job that took federal analysts about four hours took software under a minute. Falls Church doesn’t have Flock, and that is not the good news you think it is.
Start with what the public record shows. A September 2025 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement award with a total value of approximately $1.47 million purchased Authentic8 Silo licenses for ICE Homeland Security Investigations’ Office of Intelligence. The contractor tied to that award is also listed by Loudoun County in its Active Business Accounts, current as of July 1, 2026, at a Falls Church mailing address. The record does not establish that the Silo work was performed at that address. The procurement was not for cameras or agents. It was for software.
That distinction matters. The News-Press found no evidence that the contractor associated with the award surveilled Falls Church residents, operated surveillance cameras here or engaged in wrongdoing, and for that reason we are not identifying the company or its specific mailing address. What matters to this investigation is the technology the federal government purchased and what government records and other documented sources show about its capabilities and use.
Never heard of Silo? Most people haven’t. It’s made by a company called Authentic8. The industry calls one of its functions managed attribution: an investigator works inside an isolated browser designed to separate online research from the investigator’s normal network and organizational identity. The Brennan Center for Justice, which obtained ICE records through Freedom of Information Act litigation, published emails in which an ICE Combined Intelligence Unit, staffed by Enforcement and Removal Operations and Homeland Security Investigations employees, discussed potential use of Silo; the Brennan Center says the software can integrate automated internet collection.
That is where the Falls Church connection becomes relevant. It is not evidence that someone sitting in Falls Church is watching you. It is evidence that sophisticated investigative technology purchased for a federal intelligence operation can pass through an ordinary commercial relationship carrying a local mailing address. The News-Press also found other Northern Virginia contractors advertising or performing federal homeland-security and intelligence work, but their identities are not necessary to establish the point and we are not identifying them here. Nothing reviewed for this story establishes that those businesses surveilled Falls Church residents or committed wrongdoing. This story isn’t about who sits in an office or rents a mailbox. It’s about what the government can buy, what the technology can connect and how fast it’s all growing.
The Camera Was the Easy Part
After more than a year of writing about AI, Big Tech, government databases and surveillance for this paper, I’ve come to think the camera may be the least complicated part of the story. You already know Falls Church doesn’t have Flock, because we told you. “We don’t have any fixed cameras across the city and specifically Flock, we don’t have any relationship with them,” Police Chief Shahram Fard told the News-Press. Around us, everybody’s backing off. Arlington ordered all 41 of its county-leased Flock cameras pulled, Fairfax County paused new stationary installations, and Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins said, “I do not think there’s a role for Flock in this community.” So we’re off the hook, right? Not so fast. Follow the data past the camera and things get a whole lot bigger.
The Numbers
Flock runs about 120,000 AI-powered cameras nationwide, according to Sen. Josh Hawley’s office. At least 159 Virginia law-enforcement agencies use automated license-plate readers, including 137 that use Flock Safety, according to a 2025 Virginia State Crime Commission survey, and data from five cameras in the little Shenandoah Valley town of Bridgewater had been accessed 6.9 million times from around the country over 12 months. Five cameras, nearly 7 million accesses. No kidding. Location data doesn’t even need a camera. The Federal Trade Commission said Virginia-based Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel claimed to process more than 17 billion location signals a day from about a billion phones, and alleged the data could reveal visits to clinics and houses of worship before the FTC restricted the companies’ sale of sensitive location data.
Then there’s what ICE can buy. The Intercept reported that ICE users ran 1,211,643 searches of the commercial database LexisNexis in seven months of 2021. In 2023, the outlet reported that the agency was pulling in 30 million new license-plate records a month through LexisNexis, could put 2,500 plates on a watchlist at once and could search back five years. Our own senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, note that ICE alone received $75 billion, “more funding than that allocated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Meanwhile, Virginia law makes our police delete most plate-reader data after 21 days. Twenty-one days here, five years there. Virginia’s rule binds Virginia cops. It does not require that outside commercial archive to be deleted after 21 days.
And your phone? In January, 404 Media reported that ICE bought access to a tool called Webloc that, according to the outlet, can monitor phones across entire neighborhoods using commercial location data, and that an ICE legal analysis concluded no warrant was needed. No warrant, for a whole neighborhood. Your street. Your kid’s school. Your doctor’s office. The data comes from apps already sitting on your phone.
Remember Feb. 4, 2004
On Friday, Oct. 9, Hollywood drags us all back to Facebook with “The Social Reckoning,” Aaron Sorkin’s companion to “The Social Network,” starring Mikey Madison as whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. Here’s a date I doubt the movie dwells on. On Feb. 4, 2004, Wired reported that the Pentagon had killed LifeLog, a DARPA project aimed at turning a person’s life into a machine-readable record of messages, purchases, travel and experiences. That same day, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com.
No, the Pentagon didn’t hand LifeLog to Zuckerberg, and no spy agency secretly built Facebook. There’s no credible evidence for any of that. The real story is wilder than the conspiracy theory. The government shelved its plan to record your life, and within a decade more than a billion of us were doing it ourselves, for free, one friend request, tagged photo and check-in at a time. Nobody had to plan it. We built the file ourselves.
Washington Stares at the Pole
On Sept. 23, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Missouri Republican Josh Hawley held a hearing titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” Hawley had invited the CEOs of Flock Safety, Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions and Verkada. His office said all four declined. Days earlier, asked about Flock aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump said, “I sort of like them, because of law enforcement. Some people don’t. They think it’s an infringement. But I like them.” That’s the camera fight, and it’s scrambled party lines all over the country.
The bigger AI fight blew up on Sept. 29. After a White House lunch with technology executives including Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, Trump announced a voluntary industry accord on “super intelligence,” his preferred term for artificial intelligence, and said he was seeing “tremendous self-policing” by the industry. The same day, Sen. Mark Warner, with Sens. Brian Schatz and Andy Kim, asked the Senate to pass the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act of 2026, which would create an AI Safety Board, require developers of the most advanced models to give the board access at least 45 days before release and impose fines of up to $250,000 per violation, per day. Sen. Ted Cruz objected. Done. Warner’s bill targets powerful AI models, not how agencies connect your records, but the timing says plenty. Changing the name, Warner said, “does nothing to address the very real risks that come with increasingly powerful AI systems.” He added: “The question is whether Washington is going to act before something goes seriously wrong — or wait until afterward to ask why we didn’t.”
Richmond Tried. A Judge Said Not So Fast.
Virginia thought it had done something about ICE this year. Senate Bill 783, from Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim of Fairfax, and House Bill 1441, from Del. Alfonso Lopez of Arlington, required local agreements with ICE to carry a dozen new conditions, including limits on surveillance technology. The Justice Department sued in June. On Aug. 31, a day before the Sept. 1 deadline, Senior U.S. District Judge Robert Payne temporarily blocked most of the law’s restrictions as applied to Virginia’s existing 287(g) agreements, while the restriction on entering new agreements remained in place. Attorney General Jay Jones says he’ll appeal. Even if he wins, a state law can boss around a sheriff a lot easier than it can reach a federal agency or a national data broker.
Marcus Simon’s Question
Del. Marcus Simon, who represents Falls Church, responded to my plate-reader reporting with the question nobody wants to answer. It “raises an important question that I don’t think we should dismiss,” he wrote: “whether any amount of regulation can make a comprehensive database of people’s movements, and all the information it contains, truly safe from abuse.” Virginia’s 2025 law, House Bill 2724, requires a legitimate purpose for searches, audit trails and deletion of most data after 21 days. But “passing rules and making sure those rules are followed are two different things,” Simon said. Then Indianapolis supplied a real-world example of the risk. On Sept. 23, prosecutors charged five current and former officers with fraud and official misconduct over what charging documents called “thousands of impermissible searches” of Flock’s network, including one officer accused of tracking 11 people, most of them strangers, among them his ex-wife. Those cops had rules too.
The Shopping List
In a Jan. 29 letter to the DHS inspector general, Warner and Kaine didn’t pull punches. “We are deeply concerned that ICE’s surge in brutality against American communities is being facilitated by the inappropriate and unsupervised use of surveillance technology,” they wrote, according to 404 Media. Their list reads like a shopping cart: ad-tech data, 30 proposed social-media surveillance contractors, iris scanning, Palantir, Paragon Solutions, Clearview AI, PenLink phone tracking, and reports that DHS personnel got into Flock without official access. Those are the senators’ concerns, not findings of wrongdoing. Within days of their Jan. 29 letter, the DHS inspector general informed the senators that his office had initiated an audit examining how DHS components collect, store, use and share sensitive personal data and whether those practices comply with law. Congress has taken one real swing at purchased data: the House passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act in 2024, while a Senate effort to attach it to FISA reauthorization failed 31-61. A less settled question is what happens after data is in hand, when software helps analysts determine that a plate here, a phone there and a face somewhere else may belong to the same person.
Four Hours. Under One Minute.
Here’s the number that ought to stop everybody cold. ICE’s Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment, called RAVEn, was built with machine learning and graph analysis for Homeland Security Investigations. DHS reported that, in one representative test, analysts manually combining information from two commonly used datasets needed about four hours. RAVEn completed the same task in less than a minute. For much of the history of record-keeping, one of the practical protections around your privacy wasn’t a law or a judge. It was human time. Somebody had to pull the file, compare addresses and untangle three spellings of your name. Cut four hours to under a minute and every database the government can already reach gets more powerful overnight, without collecting one new record about you.
It’s already producing answers. 404 Media reported in January that ICE uses a Palantir-built app called ELITE that maps potential deportation targets, brings up dossiers and provides a “confidence score” for how likely someone is to be at an address, using addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services among other sources. A camera collects. A database stores. Software can help analysts determine which records appear to refer to the same person, identify relationships among records and assess where a person may be located. That’s the part that gets far less attention in Congress than the camera on the pole.
It Started Next Door
Falls Church has been near the center of this idea for 30 years. In 1995, Capital One co-founder Richard Fairbank told The Washington Post that the credit-card business “isn’t really a banking business. It’s an information business.” The company, spun off from Richmond’s Signet Bank and headquartered just outside the city line at a Falls Church address on Fairview Park Drive, reported by 1998 that its data warehouse held basic information on 120 million households. It was not a spy operation, and it would be nonsense to call it one. It was proof that information plus computing plus prediction could remake an industry. Falls Church doesn’t have Flock. What we have is a front-row seat to the much bigger machine that systems like Flock feed.
Continued online at FCNP.com: the full story of Feb. 4, 2004; the casino software that In-Q-Tel, the investment firm the CIA created, helped finance; the $775 million sale that carried powerful data-mining technology into the private sector; the ICE operation targeting parents and relatives of unaccompanied migrant children that used Palantir-built software and resulted in 443 arrests; and the NSA’s search engine designed to make more than 850 billion records searchable.
Disclosure: AI tools assisted with editing and fact-checking; the facts were verified against the sources cited.
