Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, November 26th.

Today on Forbes, ICE spent millions on phone hacking tech just in time for Trump's mass deportation plans.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agency, is well prepared for President-elect Donald Trump's plan to deport millions of undocumented

immigrants when he takes office in January. In the three months prior to the November election,

the agency signed $20 million in contracts for new phone hacking, surveillance, and forensics

technologies that can be used to spy on and track down the people

Trump has vowed to expel from the country. A Forbes review of recent ICE contracts found

agreements to purchase an array of technologies that together can be used to surveil phone calls,

texts, and social media activity, identify people with facial recognition,

remotely hack a smartphone, and raid the contents of a device, including deleted data.

These tools are made by a series of companies, including Israel-based Paragon and Celebrite,

Canadian company Magnet Forensics, major American law enforcement contractor,

Penlink, and the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI. In the last five months,

these companies received their largest federal purchase orders to date, all from ICE,

this according to contracting records. While ICE will likely also use these

technologies across its responsibilities, which include the investigation of cybercrime and child

exploitation, critics warn they will become a powerful tool in Trump's war against undocumented

immigrants. Will Owen, of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, described cell phone hacking spyware

spending as, quote, a frightening look at how the Trump administration plans to carry out

mass deportations through authoritarian means.

He added, quote, these technologies have been used in democracies around the world

to undermine protected civil liberties.

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