Attorneys for the Heritage Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on July 7, asking a federal judge to order the agency to turn over documents on government using Babel X software to track the smart phones and social media posts of millions of Americans.
Article by Mark Tapscott from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
The Heritage litigation stems from the conservative non-profit foundation’s April 18 FOIA request to DHS for all agency documents in which appear the terms “Babel X,” “Babel,” “Babel Street” or “PanAmerica.”
Babel X is a controversial software program that allows users to monitor social media posts around the world in 200 languages, as well as listen to smart phone conversations in a specified geographic location.
The FOIA also requested copies of all DHS emails in which appears the term “@babelstreet.com” addressed to or from a lengthy list of agency officials, including Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, John D. Cohen, DHS’s Acting Under Secretary and Chief Intelligence Officer, and 11 other officials in the agency’s Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) operation.
Finally, the FOIA sought all communications “regarding the procurement, award and implementation of the award to PANAMERICA COMPUTERS, INC. regarding award 70T02021F7554N002.”
The FOIA request was submitted, according to the complaint, because “Heritage understands DHS uses Babel X to monitor unknown entities, groups, and individuals in a manner similar to that of the FBI.” The FBI spent $5 million earlier this year to buy 5,000 user permits for Babel X from PANAMERICA COMPUTERS, INC., with an option for further purchases up to $27 million.
The maker of Babel X claims, according to the Heritage suit that the powerful scraping software is capable of multiple avenues of digital surveillance, including “persistent cross-lingual search and discovery across multiple data sources with advanced statistical and crowd-sourcing techniques,” deciphering “relevant insights across 200+ languages with state-of-the-art, linguistics technology,” performing “sentiment analysis in 50+ major world languages,” filtering “by a wide range of variables including keywords, hashtags, language, authors, emojis, dates/times, regular expression,” conducting “ad-hoc research for in-depth insight on entities,” analyzing “themes, entities, and categories as well as detect relationships,” and “integrating all available data on a single platform.”
The complaint added that “DHS has purchased and continues to purchase a large number of Babel X products and uses those products for a variety of functions.”
The Heritage complaint said the FBI contract indicates that “the FBI solicited for a product that was able to gather and analyze information from the dark web and a number of common applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
“The FBI expects to run 20,000 discrete keyword searches a month through the collected data. The FBI contracting documents stated that the FBI’s ‘intent’ was to look at past events, but that ‘predictive analytics’ that would allow the FBI to ‘point to possible actions of a subject or group’ were ‘desirable.’”
The software’s maker told The Washington Post that the product does not listen to cell phone calls, according to the complaint.
In response to the Heritage FOIA, DHS officials acknowledged receiving it but then asked the foundation to narrow its request because its initial review indicated that a huge number of responsive documents were potentially involved.
After further delays, the complaint said the litigation was necessary because DHS “has failed to promptly review agency records for the purpose of locating and collecting those records that are responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request.”
In addition, DHS is “wrongfully withholding non-exempt records requested by Heritage by failing to produce any records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request,” and is further “wrongfully withholding non-exempt-agency records requested by Plaintiffs by failing to segregate exempt information in otherwise non-exempt records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request.”
The suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, asks that DHS be ordered to conduct another search for all relevant records, as well as to “produce, within 20 days of the Court’s order, or by such other date as the Court deems appropriate, any and all non-exempt records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request and indexes justifying the withholding of any responsive records withheld in whole or in part under claim of exemption.”
A spokesman for DHS could not be reached for comment in time for publication of this news story.
Joining Heritage as a plaintiff in the litigation is Heritage Senior Adviser Mike Howell, who manages the foundation’s oversight project. Howell joined Heritage in 2018 after serving at DHS in the General Counsel’s office, where he was “the chief legal point of contact for the department’s 3,000-lawyer office for all congressional oversight and investigations that concerned any of the department’s headquarters or component offices,” according to the foundation.
Before going to DHS, Howell worked on Capitol Hill from 2013 to 2017 as an attorney for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
The present FOIA lawsuit is only the second one ever filed by the nonprofit since its founding in 1973.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
