In September, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security signed a two-million-dollar contract with an Israeli spyware firm

In September , the Department of Homeland Security signed a two-million-dollar contract with an Israeli spyware company.

The company's spyware product Graphite focusses on breaching encrypted-messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal .

The technology is part of a booming multibillion-dollar market for intrusive phone-hacking software that is making government surveillance increasingly cheap and accessible.

ICE has called for private companies to submit plans for augmenting the agency’s surveillance infrastructure, including ankle monitors, and software and hardware used for tracking targets’ biometrics.

Immigration lawyers told me that such an expansion would create a frightening digital panopticon, not just for the 3.7 million people awaiting immigration hearings.

These comments target the populations that have been most vulnerable to overzealous spyware campaigns in other Western democracies. “When this happens in an authoritarian system, it is horrific but unsurprising,” Seaford , the technology executive who was hacked during Greece ’s spyware campaign, told me. “When it happens in a democracy, however, it creates a sense of disorientation: Could this happen to me? Here? Really?!’ And yet it can, and it does.”.