Exclusive: ICE reactivated its $2 million contract with Israeli spyware firm Paragon, following its acquisition by U.S. capital
The cyber division of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations on Saturday quietly lifted a stop-work order put into place by the Biden administration in October.
A $2 million contract between the U.S. branch of the Israeli spyware vendor Paragon Solutions and the cyber division of U.S. Homeland Security Investigations was quietly reenabled on Saturday, according to an official U.S. Government public procurement notice.
“This modification is to lift the stop work order,” read the update on Saturday, referring to a hold placed on the contract on October 8 as a result of a review initiated by the Biden White House. According to WIRED, the pause related to concerns that the contract potentially violated the administration’s March 2023 executive order limiting U.S. procurement of spyware. “This contract is for a fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training,” read the original procurement summary, signed on September 27, 2024.
Two months after a stop work order went into effect on the $2 million contract, Bloomberg reported that Paragon — which was founded by Ehud Schneorson, a former commander of Israel’s signals intelligence agency, Unit 8200 — had been acquired by the Boca Raton-based private equity firm AE Industrial Partners. As a result, Paragon was merged into the Virginia-based cyber intelligence firm REDLattice.
Now that Paragon is American-owned, the Trump administration has quietly lifted the stop work order of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s procurement of the firm’s spyware. While already public within the upstream Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS.gov), the end to the stop work order is expected to become public in USASpending.gov by the end of Tuesday.
Both Paragon Solutions and REDLattice have long had close ties to U.S. intelligence. The CIA’s former assistant director for Korea, John Finbarr Fleming, became executive chairman of Paragon’s U.S. branch in January 2024 — long before the public announcement of the company’s acquisition — according to his LinkedIn profile.
Andrew G. Boyd, who from early 2020 into mid-2023 led the CIA’s primary offensive cyber arm, the Center for Cyber Intelligence, joined the board of REDLattice circa October 2023. Former U.S. Army chief of staff James McConville had similarly joined REDLattice’s board two months prior.
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the U.S. military’s premier counter-terrorism and direct action unit, which works closely with the CIA, has disclosed spending more than $11 million acquiring REDLattice’s products, including $6 million on July 18.
The San Francisco-based gig-work intelligence collection firm Premise Data, a subject of recent reports from this publication, was similarly disclosed to have received more than $1.1 million from the same ongoing JSOC contract on June 6 of last year.