Documents: multiple US military branches have bought access to Team Cymru's Augury internet monitoring tool, which claims to cover 90%+ of internet traffic
The “Augury” platform includes highly sensitive network data that Team Cymru, a private company, is selling to the military. “It's everything. Tweets: @keegan_hamilton , @shotgunner101 , @motherboard , @mjgault , @iximeow , @lorenzofb , and @josephfcox Tweets: Keegan Hamilton / @keegan_hamilton : “a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world's internet traffic, and which in some cases provides access to peoples' email data, browsing history, and other information...” https://www.vice.com/... via @josephfcox @motherboard @shotgunner101 : @GossiTheDog I love when people are like “Tiktok is spying on you”. Then articles like these come out showing western governments are gathering petabytes of data from private companies via purchases of data. https://twitter.com/... @motherboard : Additionally, Sen. Ron Wyden says that a whistleblower has contacted his office concerning the alleged warrantless use and purchase of this data by NCIS after filing a complaint through the official reporting process with the Dept. of Defense. https://www.vice.com/... Matthew Gault / @mjgault : “Augury's data can also include web browser activity, like URLs visited and cookie usage, according to the procurement records. Cookies are sensitive files that websites plant onto computers when people visit them.” https://www.vice.com/... @iximeow : how many panopticons has the us government built or bought access to now because there's like a whole list https://twitter.com/... Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / @lorenzofb : NEW: The U.S. military has purchased a tool that offers access to “petabytes” of current and historical internet data. “It's everything. There's nothing else to capture except the smell of electricity.” https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : New: the US military has spent millions of dollars on a powerful internet monitoring tool that includes browsing data, email data, cookies, more. Data is worldwide, covers 90%+ of the internet, harvested from ISPs then sold to military by private company. https://t.co/UM11cgzWVo
Context & Ripple Effects
Team Cymru's Augury sits inside a supply chain the US military has been assembling piece by piece: private companies selling access to data that agencies would otherwise need warrants to obtain. The whistleblower complaint filed with the Department of Defense and Sen. Ron Wyden — alleging NCIS bought and used Augury data without warrants — directly echoes the earlier Mobilewalla disclosure, where a data broker admitted in a letter to Wyden that it supplied device-location data to DHS, the IRS, and military customers.
What makes this report different is scale and scope: rather than location pings or scraped social profiles, Augury reportedly covers over 90% of internet traffic, including email data, browsing history, and cookies — and the documents indicate multiple branches bought in, making this look like standing procurement rather than a one-off experiment.
First-order effects
- NCIS comes under immediate scrutiny: the whistleblower's DoD complaint gives Wyden a documented case of warrantless data purchases by a specific military investigative agency, not just an abstract concern.
- Team Cymru's business model — monetizing network-level visibility for government buyers — is now public, forcing the company to defend its customer vetting and data-handling practices across its entire client base.
Second-order effects
- The commercial surveillance vendor ecosystem gets a template validated at network scale: firms like ShadowDragon already sell social-media monitoring to ICE, the State Department, and the DEA, and Augury shows the same playbook extending down to raw traffic and communications data.
- Other military units are likely to follow the procurement path already visible at the edges — the Georgia National Guard's plan to run geofenced phone surveillance around local high schools shows how far down the chain commercial data buying has reached.
Third-order effects
- If warrantless brokered-data purchases keep surfacing through whistleblowers and Wyden inquiries, Congress faces mounting pressure to close the legal gap that lets agencies buy what they cannot legally intercept — the structural question the Mobilewalla case first put on the record.
- Concentrating visibility into most of the world's traffic on a single private platform creates a high-value target; the Salt Typhoon breach of US ISPs' wiretap systems illustrates what happens when adversaries reach that monitoring layer, whether the data sits with carriers or their vendors.
The trend: Commercial data brokers are becoming the US military's default surveillance procurement channel, with legal oversight trailing well behind the contracts.