← Home

Section Hub

Surveillance:
from tissue boxes to an ICE contract

He recorded the people in his houses. Then he sold the same capability to governments. The technology is now operating inside the United States. Four tiers — what he did to individuals, what he brokered to states, the companies that carried it, and the pattern underneath — with the same names recurring at every stage.

Where it ran
His homes · African states · the US
Documented properties
4 wired
States approached
Côte d’Ivoire · Nigeria
Companies
Carbyne · Toka · Paragon
Now under US contract
Paragon → ICE
This file is open

Surveillance is the thread that runs furthest in this archive — from tissue boxes in a Manhattan townhouse to a federal contract for phone-hacking software. Much of it is documented as proposed or brokered rather than delivered, and each page below states which. Roughly 3.3 million pages remain unpublished, and no African state has opened an investigation into any of it.

Why This Is Its Own Section
He recorded the people in his houses. Then he sold the same capability to governments. The technology is now operating inside the United States.
Surveillance appears on sixteen pages of this archive and is usually read as several unrelated stories — the cameras in the townhouse, the Abidjan proposal, the Israeli cyber firms. They are one story, and the same names recur at every stage. This section puts them in order: what he did to individuals, what he brokered to states, the companies that carried it, and the pattern underneath.

The escalation is the point.

Tier one is private. Motion-activated cameras concealed in tissue boxes, installed on his own written instruction in 2014. A monitoring room in the New York mansion where a witness testified she was shown live feeds from the island.

Tier two is national. The same instinct sold outward — a thirteen-page interception architecture covering phone, satellite, tactical radio and cyber cafés, drafted for a president by a former head of Israeli military intelligence.

Tier three is commercial and current. Carbyne, Toka and Paragon. Paragon’s Graphite spyware is under contract to ICE right now. Epstein has no documented interest in Paragon — he died the year it was founded — but the man who co-founded it took a $1 million Epstein investment into an earlier surveillance company.

Tier four is the pattern. Capability tested where objection is impossible, sold where oversight is thin, and arriving last in places with functioning courts — by which time it is mature and normalised.

What connects all four. He was never the vendor and never the engineer. He supplied the introduction — the one thing no export licence, donor policy or procurement rule anywhere regulates.

The Same Names, Four Times

Ehud Barak — appears in 4,078 results in the files and made 30+ visits to Epstein’s properties. He drafted the Côte d’Ivoire proposal, took Epstein’s money into Carbyne, co-founded Toka, and co-founded Paragon.

One man appears in tiers two, three and four. That is not a coincidence of theme — it is a career.

The Barak file →

Section 01

The Four Tiers

Each tier links to the reports that document it. Start anywhere — but the order is the escalation.

01
On himself

Cameras concealed in tissue boxes, installed on his written instruction. A monitoring room with live feeds from the island, described by a witness. Recording computers that vanished before police arrived.

02
Sold to states

A thirteen-page national interception architecture drafted for Côte d’Ivoire by a former head of Israeli military intelligence. Facial recognition sold into Nigeria that had been first prototyped at the Gaza crossing.

03
The company layer

Carbyne took a $1 million Epstein investment. Toka can enter camera feeds and alter footage in real time. Paragon’s Graphite spyware is now under contract to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. All three trace to one man.

04
The pattern

Where surveillance goes first, and why it arrives before the rules do. The six-step sequence documented in African states between 2010 and 2019, now legible in American municipalities — and the constitutional question that is still open.

Section 02

The Through-Line

Read in sequence, the four tiers are one capability moving outward.

1998–2019 · the properties. Cameras at the townhouse, the island, Zorro Ranch and Palm Beach. When police searched Palm Beach in 2005, the cameras were disconnected and the recording computers were gone.

2012 · Abidjan. Epstein meets President Ouattara in a suite booked by the president’s niece. A national surveillance centre proposal follows; Israel and Côte d’Ivoire sign a security cooperation agreement in 2014.

2014–2019 · Nigeria. Barak-linked digital surveillance contracts, including facial recognition first prototyped at the Gaza crossing — tested on a population with no recourse, then sold to a state that wanted the capability.

2015 · Carbyne. Barak brokers a $1 million Epstein investment into emergency-call technology that gives dispatchers access to a caller’s camera, microphone and location.

2018 · Toka. Barak co-founds a firm that locates connected cameras in a target area, enters their feeds, and alters or erases footage in real time — and approaches Epstein about it before public launch.

2019 · Paragon. Barak co-founds it with a former commander of Unit 8200. Epstein dies in August of that year.

2024–2025 · the ICE contract. Signed, frozen under an executive order restricting foreign spyware, then unfrozen after the company was bought by American private equity. The software did not change. The ownership did.

Documented capability, by tier
Private — tissue-box cameras on his written instruction; a monitoring room with island feeds; recording computers missing before a 2005 search
National — a 13-page interception architecture: phone, satellite, tactical radio, cyber cafés
Exported — facial recognition into Nigeria, first prototyped at the Gaza crossing
Commercial — Carbyne ($1m Epstein), Toka (alters footage in real time), Paragon (Graphite)
Domestic US — Graphite decrypts Signal and WhatsApp; $2m ICE contract active
No African state has opened an investigation. No export licence has been publicly reviewed.

Section 03

What Is Missing

The defining feature of the surveillance record is absence.

The recordings. Cameras existed at multiple properties across two decades. In the 1990s and 2000s those systems required physical media — tapes, discs — stored separately and connected by wire. Almost none of it has ever been produced.

The 2005 search. Cameras disconnected, recording computers gone.

The jail cell. The cameras that would have recorded his death failed at the critical moment.

The contracts. No African state has published what was installed, what it cost, or how it was used afterward. This site can document the proposal and the introduction. It cannot document the operation, because nobody has released it.

Which is why the distinction on every page matters: an introduction in an email is not an installed system, and this archive says so wherever the outcome is unknown.

Proposed vs. Delivered

Across the Africa technology files, one of five documented deals is confirmed completed — the Dar es Salaam port concession.

The rest collapsed, went nowhere, or remain unknown. Where the outcome is unknown, these pages say unknown rather than implying delivery.

The outcome ledger →

Section 04

Open Questions

?
Where are the recordings?
Cameras operated at multiple properties for two decades. The media has never been produced, and the storage-unit network has not been fully accounted for.
?
Was the Côte d’Ivoire centre built?
A 13-page architecture was drafted and a security agreement followed. No state has confirmed what was installed.
?
Where else was Gaza-prototyped technology sold?
Nigeria is documented. The full export record has never been published.
?
Who reviewed the export licences?
No export licence connected to any of this has been publicly reviewed.
?
Is warrantless ALPR use constitutional?
Courts are split and Schmidt v. Norfolk is on appeal to the Fourth Circuit. Unresolved.
?
How is Graphite being used by ICE?
The $2m contract is active. No public accounting of targets, volume or warrant practice exists.