Oversight Project Sues Biden DHS for Documents on Federal Surveillance of Americans’ Social Media Accounts

The Oversight Project announced today that it is filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, demanding the release of all documents related to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) contract with Babel Street, a data mining and surveillance company based in Reston, Virginia.

DHS currently maintains a contract with Babel Street for its “Babel X” product, which scrapes (retrieves and copies) data both from online sources and from “apps” running on the smartphones and other devices of billions of individuals worldwide. Government agencies can aggregate and search that data by any number of keywords and in many languages.

According to Babel Street’s website, the main function of Babel X is to, “Discover and decipher geographically diverse, multilingual data into actionable insights in real time.” The company’s founder, Jeff Chapman, told the Washington Post in 2017, “There are billions of smartphones on the planet. All you have to do is listen to them.” Per the Washington Post report, the public relationship between Babel Street and the federal government runs deep:

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