Why is a shady CIA-backed nonprofit funneling our tax dollars into the erosion of our civil liberties while enriching private investors?

And what can we do about it?

In addition to asking the media to shine a light on corporations complicit in the MAGA regime, we should be asking our Members of Congress why a shady CIA-backed venture capital firm is investing our tax dollars into companies that deprive us of our civil liberties. 

Ever heard of In-Q-Tel? Perhaps not. They aren’t often in the spotlight. But In-Q-Tel has invested in at least four companies that now play a major role in the surveillance state. 

Palantir is probably IQT’s most infamous investment. Palantir’s software targets Gazans, Angelenos, New Yorkers, and migrants in the U.S., and is increasingly unifying data streams to be able to track and target anyone known to the federal government. Palantir's software isn’t programmed to “forget” data after some period of time. “[A]ll information remains searchable for as long as it's stored on the customer's servers,” notes San Leandro activist Michael Katz-Lacabe. The federal government paid Palantir $373M in just the first quarter of 2025 and the DoD lists $1.66B in obligations to the company. 

Anduril had installed 300+ Autonomous Surveillance Towers (ASTs) for Customs & Border Protection (CBP) as of September 2024. As EFF notes, “[T]ech companies and defense contractors wield immense amounts of influence and stand to make millions, if not billions, profiting off border surveillance. The price is paid by taxpayers, but also in the civil liberties of border communities and the human rights of asylum seekers and migrants.” 

In-Q-Tel invested in BlackBag, which was then acquired by Israeli company Cellebrite. Cellebrite is best known for helping governments access data on locked cell phones. Cellebrite has eight contracts with CBP set to end between July 2025 and April 2026. 
Skydio is currently marketing its autonomous night-vision drones to law enforcement. 

Founded in 1999, In-Q-Tel (IQT) is technically an independent organization, but has received taxpayer funds each year through a line item in the CIA’s budget for the Directorate of Science and Technology. In its first year, IQT received about $28M, but that number has now snowballed to about $100M each year. It isn’t beholden to the government’s usual procurement processes and has repeatedly backed companies where its Board members had existing financial ties. 

When it invests in a company, IQT becomes a board observer and receives an equity stake. This raises a number of questions. 

First, with Board-level insights, there is no way that IQT could pretend to be unaware of the moral hazards of the products and companies that it backs. And as a nonprofit, it must be filing reports. So how is it that the U.S. government is justifying channeling our tax dollars directly into the violation of our constitutional rights to due process and privacy? Should an organization dumping funds into flagrant violations of civil liberties really be considered a public charity? 

And if IQT is essentially able to guarantee the success of its portfolio members by securing them government contracts, and is thus able to juice the value of the equity that it holds, then why does it continue to need taxpayer funds? Conversely, if taxpayers have already paid to seed these companies, then why are we paying again in the form of lucrative contracts? Is any sort of auditing being done to ensure that the scope of the contracts actually exceeds any perpetual use license granted to In-Q-Tel in exchange for its investments? Does In-Q-Tel ever back competing firms, or are they erecting monopolies that can then extract any arbitrary sum from taxpayers via government contracts? 

Is it not a risk to national security that IQT portfolio members can apparently sell their products or even companies to foreign entities? What are the privacy practices of Cellebrite with respect to data collected on U.S. persons? 

We need to incite our representatives to action on these matters. Given the composition of the current Congress, the best place to start is to press for a GAO investigation into whether taxpayers have “paid twice” for any In-Q-Tel-funded technologies. Democrats and fiscal hawks alike should be able to appreciate the irony in private finance extracting unlimited value from these companies at the expense of taxpaying Americans. We can also push for the IRS to investigate whether the nonprofit has provided undue private benefit, especially to members of its Board of Trustees. And lastly we should pressure Congress to investigate this woefully opaque organization, to see whether it has ever knowingly sold off American spy tech to foreign entities.