How commercial surveillance tools became essential to FBI investigations

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has come to rely on Clearview AI, Babel Street, and ZeroFox to support its open-source intelligence (OSINT) operations – three tools a federal watchdog said are “capable of collecting … sensitive data” on people.

While the FBI has long used publicly available information to supplement traditional investigative methods, these systems have transformed its OSINT into a continuous, data-driven capability that can identify individuals, map networks, and monitor broad swaths of online activity with unprecedented speed.

A series of disclosures in recent years, including a November 2025 report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) on the FBI’s growing use of OSINT, confirm that the three platforms sit at the center of the FBI’s investigative workflow, even as it has withheld most operational details from public view.

The PCLOB report says “the FBI determined it could not decontrol certain information, including about its use of … Clearview AI, ZeroFox, and Babel Street …”

As a result, the unclassified report contains only high-level descriptions of the tools and the privacy safeguards that surround them, while the operational specifics – including how often the platforms are used, in what kinds of investigations, and under what internal criteria – are confined to a classified annex accessible only to the White House, FBI leadership, and congressional intelligence committees.

This withheld section underscores how central and sensitive the FBI’s OSINT capabilities have become, even as they remain largely shielded from outside scrutiny.

This lack of transparency takes on special importance given that “the collection and use of open-source information poses some risk to privacy and civil liberties, especially when aggregated with other information that may reveal sensitive personal information,” PCLOB concluded.

The report’s release by Beth A. Williams, a Republican and Trump-appointed member of the board, added an unexpected layer of significance.

PCLOB is structured to be bipartisan, but it is unusual for a Trump nominee to preside over the release of a document that underscores gaps in transparency around federal surveillance tools, particularly in a political climate where the administration has attempted to remove Democratic PCLOB members and tighten control over oversight bodies.

Williams’s role in issuing the report lent it credibility across the political spectrum and underscored the degree to which PCLOB, despite recent turmoil, continues to function with a measure of institutional independence.

The PCLOB report says, “commercial tools [used by the FBI] consolidate substantial amounts of open-source information, enabling users to more efficiently conduct searches by bypassing the need to visit individual websites and conduct manual searches.”

The report noted that “these tools also filter vast amounts of open-source information, thereby limiting the amount of information that must be reviewed.”

Clearview AI anchors the bureau’s identity-resolution layer. The company’s database, built from billions of images scraped from social media platforms and public websites, allows law enforcement users to upload a photograph and receive possible matches tied to names, accounts, and online histories.

The FBI has not publicly described its use of Clearview, but PCLOB confirmed that it reviewed the FBI’s use of the tool in detail and that the bureau declined to decontrol any portion of that review for public release.

The inclusion of Clearview in the classified annex strongly implies active deployment and reflects how facial recognition-enabled OSINT has become both routine and operationally sensitive.

For FBI agents, the technology allows a face captured in surveillance footage, a livestream, a protest image, or a social media screenshot to be converted into a set of potential identities within minutes.

Babel Street’s platforms help the FBI to determine what they are doing and how they are connected online. Through its Babel X product, the bureau has access to a system that ingests data from social networks, blogs, forums, messaging platforms, news outlets, and other parts of the public web, applying translation tools, geospatial filtering, entity extraction, and trend analysis.

Procurement records show that the FBI acquired approximately 5,000 Babel X licenses, indicating bureau-wide adoption across field offices, headquarters units, and joint task forces.

PCLOB identified Babel Street as one of the FBI’s more comprehensive OSINT systems and cited it as subject to additional safeguards and audit logging because of the sensitivity of the information it can retrieve.

“The FBI reported that its employees may directly access and enter search terms into commercial tools” like Babel Street, but that with tools like ZeroFox “the FBI provides its search terms to the commercial tool provider who conducts searches on behalf of the FBI.

While the PCLOB’s public report does not describe specific FBI techniques, the platform’s documented capabilities support functions ranging from targeted research to ongoing monitoring of online discussions, emerging narratives, and geotagged activity relevant to bureau investigations.

ZeroFox fills a distinct but complementary role. Originally marketed as a cybersecurity and brand protection product, ZeroFox has expanded into a broad external threat intelligence service that scans social media platforms, the surface web, and, according to the company’s own documentation, parts of the deep and dark web for indicators of harm.

PCLOB confirmed that it reviewed the FBI’s ZeroFox Privacy Threshold Analysis, placing it in the same category of enhanced sensitivity tools as Babel Street.

Although the public report offers few specifics, ZeroFox’s documented capabilities align with likely FBI use cases, including protection of agents and facilities, detection of impersonation schemes involving federal branding, monitoring of threat activity that bridges online and physical spaces, and identification of coordinated malicious campaigns.

Taken together, the three OSINT systems allow the FBI to conduct open-source investigations that go far beyond manual review of public posts. Clearview provides rapid biometric identification. Babel Street structures and analyzes vast quantities of public and commercially acquired data. And ZeroFox monitors the broader online environment for threats directed at bureau personnel, facilities, or operations.

As a combined capability, they enable investigators to move from an unidentified face or online alias to a detailed portrait of a person’s digital activity and associations, often in near real time.

The PCLOB report underscores the extent of this integration. It noted that the FBI “often relies on such information … in early stages of counterterrorism investigations” and that three sensitive tools were subject to heightened safeguards.

At the same time, the FBI declined to release even high-level public descriptions of how Clearview, Babel Street, and ZeroFox are used in practice. This refusal illustrates both how central the tools have become and how sensitive their deployment is considered.

It also leaves unresolved questions about the role of commercial data, the handling of First Amendment protected activity, the accuracy of algorithmic outputs, and the sufficiency of internal oversight.

What is clear from the available evidence is that commercial surveillance technology now shapes the FBI’s OSINT capabilities at least as much as traditional investigative technique.

And “as access to aggregated open-source information continues to evolve,” PCLOB cautioned, “the FBI will need to continually evaluate the privacy and civil liberties impacts of new tools and datasets.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  Clearview AI  |  facial recognition  |  FBI  |  law enforcement  |  Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB)  |  U.S. Government