Records show the FBI signed a contract worth up to $27M for 5K licenses to use Babel X, a social media surveillance tool, and requested “predictive analytics”
Aaron Schaffer / Washington Post :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Babel X contract is the procurement stage of a search the FBI began years ago: in 2019 the bureau was already seeking an early-alerting tool that scans public social media for threats, an approach that risked violating Facebook and Twitter's terms. Babel Street, the vendor behind it, was separately exposed in 2020 for selling Locate X phone-tracking data drawn from popular apps to CBP, ICE and other federal agencies.
The disclosure lands in a run of FBI surveillance procurements that keep surfacing through records rather than announcements — from the 430K-iris-scan 'pilot' led with local police to the late-2020 push to deploy Pegasus in criminal investigations before it was dropped in July 2021. The 'predictive analytics' request signals the bureau wants the tool to move from monitoring to forecasting.
First-order effects
- Babel Street gains an anchor federal customer worth up to $27M for 5,000 Babel X licenses, with the FBI explicitly asking for predictive analytics — expanding the vendor's product beyond the Locate X phone-tracking business already used by CBP and ICE.
Second-order effects
- The Locate X precedent suggests other DHS and law enforcement agencies can adopt Babel X through existing vendor relationships rather than open competition, while Facebook and Twitter face renewed pressure over whether government bulk scanning of their platforms violates their own policies — the exact conflict flagged in the FBI's 2019 tool search.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from iris scans to Locate X to Babel X holds, commercial surveillance procurement becomes the default path for federal monitoring capabilities — deployed through vendor contracts and surfaced only via records requests and reporting, with oversight arriving years after deployment rather than before it.
The trend: Federal agencies are building surveillance capability by buying commercial social-media and location-analytics tools off the shelf, with predictive features and public debate arriving in that order.