DHS Contracts Explorer – Hacked data from the Office of Industry Partnership | Hacker News Reader

DHS Contracts Explorer – Hacked data from the Office of Industry Partnership

micahflee.github.io

240 pointspeq4247 comments

From the source

>I'm disclosing a list containing the details of 6,681 organizations that applied for contracts with the US Department of Homeland Security. This data was taken from the Office of Industry Partnership at https://oip.dhs.gov.

Contrary to the title this doesn't seem like all contractors? 6681 contractors in total seems a bit low for an agency as big as DHS.

It seems like that it is all contracts managed by the the Office of Industry Partnerships, within DHS's Science and Technology Directorate, which exists, per its website, to "engage industry and facilitate partnerships with private sector innovators to advance commercial technology solutions that address homeland security challenges."

This is consistent with the explorer having a drop down filter for "Program" with options exactly matching three of the four programs listed as OIP programs o their webpage, excluding "Targeted Broad Agency Announcements”, which from the description OIP participates in but are specifically for some other particular DHS component (which, might handles the actual contracting, which would explain why the data wasn't in the OIP leak, OTOH, the list of current opportunities in that category on the web is empty, so its possible that it is a category that exists in theory but is not actively being used currently.)

This is very much not all DHS contracts, and even the claim that it is "ICE/DHS" contracts seems mostly misleading clickbait trading on the degree of attention to and awareness of ICE even though these contracts are through and for a non-ICE component of DHS.

Kind of wish you'd written this as a top comment.

It's missing data for sure - at least on the awarded side. (Which is easy to vet because it's all public)

https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=181b0ab9a8cc9f30fbed...

Shouldn't contractors for ICE/DHS be completely public?

What sort of US government organization hides its contractors?

The same one that hides its agents behind masks.

I was going to say that often prison warden hide their true identities within the prison and then I realized the sad irony in what I was thinking.

Seems like, the kind that will award a $70 million contract to a guy with a hotmail address.

> Seems like, the kind that will award a $70 million contract to a guy with a hotmail address.

Why do you mention something like that without providing a link?

It anyone's interested, it's the "Cyber Apex Solutions, LLC" contract, and this looks like it has more info: https://www.washingtontechnology.com/2017/07/dhs-picks-cyber.... It looks like it's from 9 years ago.

It is all public.

If it's not already public data, this seems like the sort of thing you could probably get legally by filing a FOIA request.

Definitely not all contractors, my company at the very least used to have a contract with ICE and isn’t listed.

$70 million to a guy with a hotmail address and they couldn't keep the vendor list off the internet. but sure, trust them with biometric databases.

This is what happens when you replace the guy that knows his stuff witht a dude you know from the club.

> This is what happens when you replace the guy that knows his stuff witht a dude you know from the club.

A guy with a hotmail address hasn't been to a club in decades.

Depends on the club ;)

He could be a very successful businessman in your golf club.

I clicked on a random one. My fellow taxpayers spent $825,000 for this shit.

"The human body is a near perfect energy generator. Demand for energy harvesting innovation, along with technology advances in thin film thermoelectric generators and highly efficient DC/DC boost circuitry now place wearable thermoelectric power harvesting within reach. The objective of Perpetua`s Phase II proposal is to deliver an energy harvesting system for first responder applications powered by the human body. Building on Perpetua`s successful demonstration of wearable thermoelectric generators in Phase I, this proposal combines advances in wearable thermoelectric generators, power electronics, ultra low power transceivers, and physiological sensors integrated into a first responder jacket. In collaboration with emergency response personnel, Perpetua will field test the developed jackets. Building on several decades of experience with thermoelectric generators, system design and product integration, Perpetua will architect modular systems for wearable body energy harvesting. Perpetua`s creative approach with best-in-class technology overcomes the traditional obstacles that have prevented energy harvesting from the human body to produce adequate voltage and usable power. Wearable human body thermoelectric generators promise power solutions for autonomous self-powered sensors reducing the weight, size, and limited life of primary battery power. Long life and small dimensions are particularly important and advantageous for sensor systems for the first responder."

Why is it shit? Sounds like having your body power the electronics of your gear which isn’t insane. It’s technically difficult to get a lot of energy out but out of hand it’s not crazy. And phase ii sounds like they’ve met the previous milestone and are proposing the next iteration.

I'm curious about the usability of the clothing. Who wants to wear clothes that actively cool you when you're in a cold environment, or heat you when you're in a hot environment?

Me too, but pretending like you could get that from a phase ii proposal is premature and the wrong venue to draw such a conclusion.

It’s like the conservatives claiming $3M was spent on a shrimp treadmill to see how fast they run and is a sign of waste when the actual details were 1.5M of which only $15k was used for the treadmill to study things like the impact on shrimp of disease and changes in water quality. Low information people think they get an accurate summary of the reality.

Critical support to the folks bilking ICE with absurd R&D investments. Maybe CBP can install solar freakin' roadways at their roadside checkpoints too.

Reminds me of when I tried charging a phone with piezos in my insoles like 15 years ago. Should have applied for a grant

You too were inspired by the children's light up shoes? I know I was

Yep! Those were the coolest!

a lot of these company names are kind of hilariously non-descript. no smart wordplay, no chance of coming up with a good jingle for a commercial. exactly what you would expect, really.

"Science Applications International Corp"

"Radiation Monitoring Devices Inc"

"Physical Optics Corp"

"Physical Sciences Inc"

"Applied Nanotech Inc"

edit: this is a light hearted comment. i am not saying your favorite non-descriptly-named company is worse than any other name.

International Business Machines…

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company

General Mills

General Motors

American Telephone and Telegraph Company…

You seem to have it backwards. Companies being called Poopity Scoop is a modern phenomenon.

Companies have otherwise been named like this for centuries.

i havent heard a good jingle for any of those

(i didnt make the judgement you think i made. i simply said they are what i expected: very non-descript)

IBM had a corporate songbook!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YBpNzxz1XgU

that was fascinating, i had no idea. and, surprisingly, i dont think i knew of this channel which seems to have a ton of interesting videos. thanks for that.

There’s an interesting talk that relates to this: Trevor Paglen’s “Seeing the Secret State: Six Landscapes”[0]. He investigates some of the front companies involved in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. They mostly have unassuming names, presumably by design.

[0]: https://youtu.be/lvEMSRKniWk

The cover is a strange thing to judge a book by. SAIC isn't somehow worse because they couldn't think of a witty name 60 years ago. IBM couldn't either, nor General Motors. Basic descriptive names are actually pretty good compared to meaningless "Meta" or "Google" that have no idea what industry they even want to appear to be in.

>SAIC isn't somehow worse because they couldn't think of a witty name 60 years ago.

is "non-descript" an insult now, or something? where do you read "worse" in my comment?

Your comment reads as negative about the corporations even if that's not what you intended. There's something about the way it's reads (I noticed myself when I read your comment, then noticed your edit at the bottom). Nuance usually does not translate well on the internet.

The first one is literally a well-known massive corporation

>The first one is literally a well-known massive corporation

i am sorry, i really must have messed up in my comment somewhere. on top of not trying to insult these companies by saying they have non-descript names, i was also not trying to imply that they are small.

non-descript, and what i expected of government contractor names. thats all.

That's what I did when I created a hemp company in 2019. And then I registered a dba (doing business as) with the real name. It made banking easier.

whoever is involved with this know that future generations will curse you for it

Automatically identifying person-based characteristics is helpful in variety of industries for threat detection. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is interested in a video analysis tool that can automatically identify and catalog anthropometric characteristics that are important to On-Person Screening in real time. Toyon Research Corporation proposes to tackle this problem by breaking it into main parts to solve. First, the task of initially localizing and describing airline passenger characteristics can be framed as an object detection problem. Second, the task of tracking airline passengers across a video stream once the characteristics have been initially identified can be done through traditional tracking algorithms that have the ability to run in real-time.

I'm a bit confused by claiming that this is confidential information. I thought contract awards were public? Would someone who is more in this space be willing to explain what actually was leaked here?

If the data includes every contractor that competed for an award & lost, that is data is typically not public.

Hey while we're at it, here's Y Combinator's list of defense startups it funds :) :) :)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/defense

Wow they are still calling it defense in the year of our overlord, 80?

I don't think they're going to write a blog post called "Imperial War Profiteer Startups funded by Y Combinator in 2026".

It's the Military Combinator Complex. As the years go by though, I become more convinced that there is no technology which is not dual-use.

DAIVIN! is a waste. Rebreathers exist for a reason and are better suited for tactical underwater ops.

Hate to see it but I understand why. Surprised it took this long.

Looks like some universities are there too. UC SanDiego and USC.

Good.

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