Instead, the $252 billion option would include additional Patriot missile batteries and air-control squadrons, dozens of new aircraft, and next-generation systems to defend against drone and cruise missile attacks on major population centers, military bases, and other key areas.
At the other end of the spectrum, Harrison writes that the “most robust air and missile defense shield possible” will cost some $3.6 trillion through 2045, nearly double the life cycle cost of the F-35 fighter jet, the most expensive weapons program in history.
“In his Oval Office announcement, President Trump set a high bar for Golden Dome, declaring that it would complete ‘the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland and the success rate is very close to 100 percent,'” Harrison writes.
The numbers necessary to achieve this kind of muscular defense are staggering: 85,400 space-based interceptors, 14,510 new air-launched interceptors, 46,904 more surface-launched interceptors, hundreds of new sensors on land, in the air, at sea, and in space to detect incoming threats, and more than 20,000 additional military personnel.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket could offer a much cheaper ride to orbit for thousands of space-based missile interceptors. Credit: SpaceX
No one has placed missile interceptors in space before, and it will require thousands of them to meet even the most basic goals for Golden Dome. Another option Harrison presents in his paper would emphasize fast-tracking a limited number of space-based interceptors that could defend against a smaller attack of up to five ballistic missiles, plus new missile warning and tracking satellites, ground- and sea-based interceptors, and other augmentations of existing missile-defense forces.
That would cost an estimated $471 billion over the next 20 years.
Supporters of the Golden Dome project say it’s much more feasible today to field space-based interceptors than it was in the Reagan era. Commercial assembly lines are now churning out thousands of satellites per year, and it’s cheaper to launch them today than it was 40 years ago.
A report released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in May examined the effect of reduced launch prices on potential Golden Dome architectures. The CBO estimated that the cost of deploying between 1,000 and 2,000 space-based interceptors would be between 30 and 40 percent cheaper today than the CBO found in a previous study in 2004.
But the costs just for deploying up to 2,000 space-based interceptors remain astounding, ranging from $161 billion to $542 billion over 20 years, even with today’s reduced launch prices, according to the CBO. The overwhelming share of the cost today would be developing and building the interceptors themselves, not launching them.
Anthropic’s AI models could potentially help spies analyze classified documents, but the company draws the line at domestic surveillance. That restriction is reportedly making the Trump administration angry.
On Tuesday, Semafor reported that Anthropic faces growing hostility from the Trump administration over the AI company’s restrictions on law enforcement uses of its Claude models. Two senior White House officials told the outlet that federal contractors working with agencies like the FBI and Secret Service have run into roadblocks when attempting to use Claude for surveillance tasks.
The friction stems from Anthropic’s usage policies that prohibit domestic surveillance applications. The officials, who spoke to Semafor anonymously, said they worry that Anthropic enforces its policies selectively based on politics and uses vague terminology that allows for a broad interpretation of its rules.
The restrictions affect private contractors working with law enforcement agencies who need AI models for their work. In some cases, Anthropic’s Claude models are the only AI systems cleared for top-secret security situations through Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud, according to the officials.
Anthropic offers a specific service for national security customers and made a deal with the federal government to provide its services to agencies for a nominal $1 fee. The company also works with the Department of Defense, though its policies still prohibit the use of its models for weapons development.
In August, OpenAI announced a competing agreement to supply more than 2 million federal executive branch workers with ChatGPT Enterprise access for $1 per agency for one year. The deal came one day after the General Services Administration signed a blanket agreement allowing OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to supply tools to federal workers.
Last week, Microsoft announced that it would no longer use China-based engineering teams to support the Defense Department’s cloud computing systems, following ProPublica’s investigation of the practice, which cybersecurity experts said could expose the government to hacking and espionage.
But it turns out the Pentagon was not the only part of the government facing such a threat. For years, Microsoft has also used its global workforce, including China-based personnel, to maintain the cloud systems of other federal departments, including parts of Justice, Treasury and Commerce, ProPublica has found.
This work has taken place in what’s known as the Government Community Cloud, which is intended for information that is not classified but is nonetheless sensitive. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the US government’s cloud accreditation organization, has approved GCC to handle “moderate” impact information “where the loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability would result in serious adverse effect on an agency’s operations, assets, or individuals.”
The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has used GCC to support its criminal and civil investigation and litigation functions, according to a 2022 report. Parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education have also used GCC.
Microsoft says its foreign engineers working in GCC have been overseen by US-based personnel known as “digital escorts,” similar to the system it had in place at the Defense Department.
Nevertheless, cybersecurity experts told ProPublica that foreign support for GCC presents an opportunity for spying and sabotage. “There’s a misconception that, if government data isn’t classified, no harm can come of its distribution,” said Rex Booth, a former federal cybersecurity official who now is chief information security officer of the tech company SailPoint.
“With so much data stored in cloud services—and the power of AI to analyze it quickly—even unclassified data can reveal insights that could harm US interests,” he said.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has admitted to buying records from data brokers detailing which websites and apps Americans use, US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed Thursday.
“The US government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans’ privacy are not just unethical but illegal,” Wyden said in a letter to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines. “To that end, I request that you adopt a policy that, going forward,” intelligence agencies “may only purchase data about Americans that meets the standard for legal data sales established by the FTC.”
Wyden suggested that the intelligence community might be helping data brokers violate an FTC order requiring that Americans are provided “clear and conspicuous” disclosures and give informed consent before their data can be sold to third parties. In the seven years that Wyden has been investigating data brokers, he said that he has not been made “aware of any company that provides such a warning to users before collecting their data.”
The FTC’s order came after reaching a settlement with a data broker called X-Mode, which admitted to selling sensitive location data without user consent and even to selling data after users revoked consent.
In his letter, Wyden referred to this order as the FTC outlining “new rules,” but that’s not exactly what happened. Instead of issuing rules, FTC settlements often serve as “common law,” signaling to marketplaces which practices violate laws like the FTC Act.
According to the FTC’s analysis of the order on its site, X-Mode violated the FTC Act by “unfairly selling sensitive data, unfairly failing to honor consumers’ privacy choices, unfairly collecting and using consumer location data, unfairly collecting and using consumer location data without consent verification, unfairly categorizing consumers based on sensitive characteristics for marketing purposes, deceptively failing to disclose use of location data, and providing the means and instrumentalities to engage in deceptive acts or practices.”
The FTC declined to comment on whether the order also applies to data purchases by intelligence agencies. In defining “location data,” the FTC order seems to carve out exceptions for any data collected outside the US and used for either “security purposes” or “national security purposes conducted by federal agencies or other federal entities.”
NSA must purge data, Wyden says
NSA officials told Wyden that not only is the intelligence agency purchasing data on Americans located in the US but that it also bought Americans’ Internet metadata.
Wyden warned that the former “can reveal sensitive, private information about a person based on where they go on the Internet, including visiting websites related to mental health resources, resources for survivors of sexual assault or domestic abuse, or visiting a telehealth provider who focuses on birth control or abortion medication.” And the latter “can be equally sensitive.”
To fix the problem, Wyden wants intelligence communities to agree to inventory and then “promptly” purge the data that they allegedly illegally collected on Americans without a warrant. Wyden said that this process has allowed agencies like the NSA and the FBI “in effect” to use “their credit card to circumvent the Fourth Amendment.”
X-Mode’s practices, the FTC said, were likely to cause “substantial injury to consumers that are not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition and are not reasonably avoidable by consumers themselves.” Wyden’s spokesperson, Keith Chu, told Ars that “the data brokers selling Internet records to the government appear to engage in nearly identical conduct” to X-Mode.
The FTC’s order also indicates “that Americans must be told and agree to their data being sold to ‘government contractors for national security purposes’ for the practice to be allowed,” Wyden said.
DoD defends shady data broker dealings
In response to Wyden’s letter to Haines, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, Ronald Moultrie, said that the Department of Defense (DoD) “adheres to high standards of privacy and civil liberties protections” when buying Americans’ location data. He also said that he was “not aware of any requirement in US law or judicial opinion” forcing the DoD to “obtain a court order in order to acquire, access, or use” commercially available information that “is equally available for purchase to foreign adversaries, US companies, and private persons as it is to the US government.”
In another response to Wyden, NSA leader General Paul Nakasone told Wyden that the “NSA takes steps to minimize the collection of US person information” and “continues to acquire only the most useful data relevant to mission requirements.” That includes some commercially available information on Americans “where one side of the communications is a US Internet Protocol address and the other is located abroad,” data which Nakasone said is “critical to protecting the US Defense Industrial Base” that sustains military weapons systems.
While the FTC has so far cracked down on a few data brokers, Wyden believes that the shady practice of selling data without Americans’ informed consent is an “industry-wide” problem in need of regulation. Rather than being a customer in this sketchy marketplace, intelligence agencies should stop funding companies allegedly guilty of what the FTC has described as “intrusive” and “unchecked” surveillance of Americans, Wyden said.
According to Moultrie, DNI Haines decides what information sources are “relevant and appropriate” to aid intelligence agencies.
But Wyden believes that Americans should have the opportunity to opt out of consenting to such invasive, secretive data collection. He said that by purchasing data from shady brokers, US intelligence agencies have helped create a world where consumers have no opportunity to consent to intrusive tracking.
“The secrecy around data purchases was amplified because intelligence agencies have sought to keep the American people in the dark,” Wyden told Haines.
