The American federal agency charged with preventing market manipulation is in the process of acquiring artificial intelligence-powered agents for monitoring cellphone locations, social media posts, and credit header data, according to newly public software subscription renewal documents.
The proposed contract renewal comes roughly five years after Babel Street’s similar sale of cellphone location-tracking datasets to the sanctions enforcement arm of the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), as uncovered by this author through a Freedom of Information request. OFAC last week became a central component of the second Trump administration’s overt repurposing of surveillance capabilities initially granted for combating al Qaeda towards crushing left-wing political movements both at home and abroad.
“Through our Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and [IRS Criminal Investigation], we have spent decades developing the world’s most sophisticated financial counterterrorism capabilities,” stated U.S. treasury secretary and former Soros Fund Management chief investment officer Scott Bessent on July 16. “And now we are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home,” added Bessent.
“The [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission] requires a cloud-based software solution that provides real-time data aggregation, analytics, and risk intelligence capabilities in support of its mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation,” stated a high-level summary of a software subscription renewal published to the award management site SAM.gov on Wednesday, with offers due by August 5, 2026. The proposed start date of the renewed access is August 14, one day after the end of a $1.4 million, five-year contract between Babel Street and the SEC which began on August 9, 2021.
An attached (partly redacted) price list for the renewing product licenses from the Reston-based data broker Babel Street contains explicit references to the company’s most controversial product: the cellphone location-tracking platform Locate X, which has historically gathered precise GPS locations of the personal cellphones of unsuspecting civilians around the world through backroom deals with application developers.
One of the lead executives overseeing Locate X has been the former CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) senior targeting officer Patrick Butler, who subsequently became the founder and CEO of the In-Q-Tel-backed link-analysis company PATHAR/Dunami, which was acquired by Babel Street in June 2020, leading Butler to rise to an executive vice president at Babel.
(Relationships between Babel Street and former high-level CIA executives are plentiful: the former CIA chief operating officer Maura Burns also joined the advisory board of Babel after retiring from the spy agency last year; former CIA chief data scientist Barbara N. Stevens was also announced as an advisor to Babel in February 2024, and a former chief operating officer for the CIA’s hacking arm, Dare King, was an executive vice president at Babel circa 2018 to 2019.)
Each of the yearly software license packages up for renewal with the SEC — an initial base year and nine optional years — includes two licenses to Babel Street’s “Locate X Premium” data package, with part number TPD-LXP-001, ten licenses for “Babel Street Insights Platform,” one license for “US Credit Header and US Criminal Records Search,” and the rights to conduct 12,000 calls to the “Identity API.”
Yet another attachment to Wednesday’s software renewal solicitation provides an overview of Babel Street’s extension of its surveillance products to leverage artificial intelligence agents. One of the four listed “salient characteristics” for the SEC’s renewal of its Babel Street licenses was “Agentic AI-Driven Workflows,” which was said to include AI agents which “can independently conduct complex, multi-step threat investigations, discover supply chain vulnerabilities, and perform digital telemetry.” Babel’s AI agents were further claimed to have the ability “to bypass the safety filters found on general-purpose consumer AI models, [which] lets analysts explicitly query and summarize malicious material, extremist communications, and raw digital exhaust.”
According to the same document, Babel Street specializes in “defense-sector threat hunting which is currently being used at the SEC.”
A research paper published in August 2024, which received press coverage from POLITICO, expressed concerns that SEC investigators could have their movements surveilled and investigations unmasked through cellphone location-tracking data. But now it seems that the investigators are themselves leveraging the same data.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s primary point of contact for the software renewal, Paul LaFranchise, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Whose going to monitor the monitors of the monitors?” Straight out of Enemy of the State.
Thanks, Jack. We're screwed, eh? So ironic that the bastion of freedom is promoting this latest assault on our freedom.