This Secret $35 Million FBI Unit (MXU)
In the wake of a mass shooting or terror attacks
investigators can be left with hours of CCTV footage, video from witnesses, or
clips from social media. Take the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, where the
FBI received over 13,000 videos and had 120 analysts probe them all for clues.
As it seeks to improve its ability to sift through such
abundances of video at major crime scenes, Forbes has learned that a
previously-unreported forensics division within the FBI called the Multimedia
Exploitation Unit (MXU) has been tasked with this role. It has cost at least
$35 million since 2016 and draws on cutting-edge expertise from Mitre
Corporation, a non-profit government skunkworks that receives between $1 and $2
billion a year from the U.S. government.
Documents obtained via FOIA reveal that MXU, run out of the
FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) division, seeks to “process
and exploit multimedia assets” so that the FBI can “transform… bulk data into
investigative leads.” The unit has pushed one smaller security contractor -
West Virginia-based Azimuth Inc - to create tech for "bulk multimedia
search" and “image clustering” that brings together content that’s been
flagged by facial and object recognition technology in an easy-to-digest tool.
There’s little more information available on MXU, though one
conference line-up online revealed that the chief ,as of late 2018, was Sam
Cava, previously head of the Department of Defense’s Biometrics Fusion Center,
established in 2000 to help the military deploy technologies like facial
recognition. Used to keep tabs on military detainees, prisoners of war and
other individuals deemed a threat to national security, the center started
collaborating with the FBI CJIS unit back in the mid-2000s.
Looking through contract records, Mitre was the biggest tech
and services provider for the unit, receiving nearly $20 million in contracts.
The only other major supplier was Azimuth Inc, from West Virginia, which
received $15 million. The first contracts for the unit were handed out in 2016,
according to a review of federal procurement records.
Chris Piehota, the recently-retired chief of the FBI science
and tech division, tells Forbes that the unit is a small, specialist division
within the FBI whose sole focus is to build software to analyze photo and video
in major crimes.
“If you're collecting terabytes of video information from a
horrific scene or a horrific event, the MXU comes in with their tools. They
help investigative personnel make that footage usable. They parse out what we
call non-pertinent footage. And they provide analytics and identification to
pertinent investigative information in that video footage,” Piehota adds. “They
were key in all of the mass shootings that happened over the past several years
in the United States.”
The FBI acknowledged a request for comment on the MXU
provided comment at the time of publication. Mitre had previously repeatedly
declined Forbes’ requests for comment on any aspect of its work.
MXU is one of many collaborations between Mitre and the FBI.
They’ve had a working relationship since at least the 1990s, when the elite
government labs provider started to expand beyond its typical aviation and
military work. A 1993 Boston Globe article detailed Mitre’s work to improve the
National Crime Information Center, a huge electronic clearinghouse of crime
data that’s accessible to most policing agencies. One addition was a system to
send mugshots directly to patrol cars. “The FBI used Mitre extensively for all
sorts of different things from development of processes, development of
software, and then providing personnel to do various tasks like intelligence,
cybersecurity, that sort of thing,” recalls Jason Truppi, a former FBI agent
turned cybersecurity entrepreneur, who was at the agency between 2008 and 2015.
Earlier this week, Forbes revealed work on a Mitre-FBI
project to take people’s fingerprints from images on social media sites like
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The two also worked together to build the Next
Generation Identification (NGI) system, said by the FBI to be “the world's
largest and most efficient electronic repository of biometric and criminal
history information.” As described by Piehota, it’s a place where any law
enforcement body in the U.S. can look up fingerprints, faces or other biometric
information of criminal suspects.
Mitre engineers have also worked with the FBI to take down
the Silk Road drugs marketplace, and other dark web investigations. As revealed
in another document obtained via FOIA, Mitre has a close relationship with the
FBI’s intelligence division. Summing up the importance of Mitre to the FBI is a
contract with the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, which reads: “Having
had a close support relationship with the FBI for over 30 years, and in
particular with the intelligence programs of the bureau for over 10 years,
Mitre’s National Security Engineering Center provides a unique perspective and
a demonstrated propensity to help solve complex challenges.”
Mitre’s work with the law enforcement goes beyond snooping,
however. One additional contract obtained by Forbes details its work on
protecting the FBI's own data. It asks Mitre to ensure the FBI’s Information
and Technology Branch to develop access rules for the agency’s “top secret,
secret and unclassified” information troves. As much of Mitre’s own work for
the FBI covers both targeted and mass surveillance, the nonprofit will be
helping keep its own work under lock and key.
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