Stormont pumps money into ICE surveillance tech

Invest Northern Ireland (Invest NI), Stormont’s business development agency, has been ploughing funds into a software company making spying tools for Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs.

An investigation by the Belfast Telegraph revealed how Belfast-based Nisos make a range of programmes that can potentially be used to violate human rights.

Nisos is a US-headquartered firm that claims to “help law enforcement bring those who lurk in the shadows to justice”.

Meanwhile, another US contractor, Amentum, which partners with ICE’s bosses, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), advertised a job in which the successful candidate will be:

…comparing internal ICE-provided data against NISOS investigative results to identify discrepancies or corroborating evidence…

This implies the tech is being used to hunt down people ICE target in its brutal raids terrorising immigrant communities in the US.

Belfast Telegraph reporters spoke to a software engineer, who attended two job interviews at Nisos’s Urban HQ Belfast base.

The man was “deeply uneasy” by what he thought Nisos wanted him to do.  He was told his job there would:

…involve using “automated intrusion systems” to vacuum up vast volumes of personal data from the internet.

As a result of what Nisos said, the man felt the technology was likely going to be used to spy on US citizens in an unethical or illegal way.

ICE thugs have deported over 450,000 people

ICE is a fundamentally lawless and unethical organisation. Trump’s murderous brownshirts have been rampaging across the US, killing, imprisoning and deporting vast numbers of people. The agency has kicked out “442,637 people between October 2024 and September 2025,” according to statistics cited by the Belfast Telegraph.

ICE is also known to routinely pick up the wrong people, so there are likely many among that number who have been unjustly ripped from their home. An Irish man with a valid work permit was held for five months.

Once imprisoned, detainees often have to endure squalid and overcrowded conditions.

There are other troubling aspects to Nisos’ work, including the fact they moved to Belfast “partly because it wanted to be close to MI5’s Holywood base”.

The Nisos CEO:

…asked Invest NI for advice on “the career decisions people make when departing MI5 in Palace Barracks”…

It is deeply troubling that a US company seeking to profit off of ICE criminality is looking to leverage MI5’s sinister past in Six Counties surveillance work. MI5 had a hand in all manner of abuses carried out by security forces in the region, including mass internment and murderous collusion with paramilitaries.

Nisos surveillance tech targets workers

Nisos tech also has worrying implications for workers’ rights. The Telegraph article describes how their software:

…was built to counter insider threats in large organisations, allowing companies to proactively spot leakage of commercially-sensitive information or threats to executives.

To do this:

…companies would upload their entire workforces to the platform, something meant to be covered in the small print of employees’ contracts. It would mean their employer could effectively spy on their private lives, monitoring personal social media accounts, financial information and other data to spot when they might become a potential threat.

A former employee said there is potential for this to be “vastly abused”. It could allow bosses spying on an employee to:

…identify that person’s home location, work location or their children’s school — the places they’re likely to be at some point each day.

Workers already enjoy minimal freedom in deeply hierarchical workplaces. Many effectively lose their right to free speech, as everything they say publicly is policed by their employer. This surveillance tech is just another means of corporate control over workers.

Nisos’ software also looks like it is potentially implicated in US violence abroad. It’s reported that they offer it for:

• Identification of foreign scientific research activity and development
• Tailored investigations into the activities of specific foreign military or paramilitary units

Corporate-state spying poses huge threat to basic freedoms

General use of this sort of technology by a corporate-state nexus presents a huge threat to individual freedom.

Prior to its arrival, the principle of public activity having limited expectations of privacy protection were reasonable. Perhaps a certain amount of CCTV outdoors in cities could be justified as one’s activities were in plain view already. Similarly, if you’d posted on social media for the world to see, it wasn’t valid to claim your privacy was violated if someone cited it to criticise you.

However, when there are cameras everywhere, tech companies that hoover up all social media content and AI to make sense of all this data, the calculation changes. The power attained from collating your cumulative public presence gives those who hold this information enormous power. It is this asymmetry of the state and corporations versus the individual that ICE is abusing.

Meanwhile, Invest NI finds itself with more questions to answer. The agency has also been funding the F-35 warplane programme, a killing machine used for the Gaza holocaust. Sinn Féin economy minister, Caoimhe Archibald, conducted a review that dishonestly attempted to whitewash this funding.

It would now seem appropriate to conduct a full review into all current Invest NI spending to see if further skeletons lurk in the closet. Alongside that, a revised ethics policy will ensure the north of Ireland public never again have their money pumped into criminal endeavours.

Featured image via the Canary