U.S. Government Spends $832,000 on TrapWire

Recent WikiLeaks documents have revealed that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security paid US$832,000 to deploy Trapwire surveillance in Washington, D.C. and Seattle.

E-mails uncovered in a hack earlier this year from Strategic Forecasting Inc., a global intelligence company based in Austin, Texas suggested that Occupy groups were being spied on with the system.

As reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, TrapWire is a the system that digitally records video at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States and around the world and instantaneously delivers intelligence information to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location.

The spending revealed by WikiLeaks is in line with estimates from Biometrics Research Group Inc., publisher of BiometricUpdate.com, that recently predicted that funding for homeland security and defense applications would rise from US$190 billion in 2011 to US$210 billion by 2014.

According to the National Priorities Project, homeland security spending has risen from US$16 billion in fiscal 2001 to US$69.1 billion in 2011 – a 300 percent increase. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that Department of Homeland Security contract spending for security devices and technology nearly doubled from US$5.4 billion in 2004, the first year the department was fully operational, to US$10 billion in 2010.

Biometrics Research Group expects that U.S. government spending in the areas of biometric tracking and data mining services will only increase over time.

Article Topics

Anonymous  |  defense  |  government  |  homeland security  |  privacy  |  surveillance  |  TrapWire