404 Media: “It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations. Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on.

“FPDS may have been a little clunky, but its simple, old-school interface made it extremely functional and robust. Every facet of government operations touches on contracting at one point, and this was the first tool that many investigative journalists and researchers would reach for to quickly find out what the government is buying and who is selling it, and how these contracts all fit together,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. I’ve used FPDS to reveal ICE paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars for work on “complete target analysis of known populations” (which then led to a leak from inside Palantir describing the company’s new work for ICE); figure out Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spent millions of dollars on software that uses AI to detect “sentiment and emotion” in online posts; and identify the multiple agencies that bought access to a massive, and warrantless, database of peoples’ travel histories. FPDS was very basic, in a very good way. You could type in something like “Clearview AI” for example, and it would show all the government contracts that mentioned the facial recognition company. That included both contracts with Clearview AI, but also ones with larger government contractors that were reselling the technology and included “Clearview AI” in the item description. Often when digging through government purchasing data you’ll find some surveillance technology is not sold to agencies by the company directly, but by firms that have ongoing relationships with the government…”