Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The marketing firm with an intelligence contract
Its website is called nContext. The site shows a picture of the Y in Philadelphia and a cultural center in New York City and presents them as clients, with a pitch about helping people obtain data, understand it, and run marketing campaigns.
The government's procurement website shows the same company with a contract with the intelligence community. That looks like a shell company, the kind a defense contractor sets up to collect large amounts of commercially available advertising data and hand it to parts of the government that want to use it.
Other vendors skip the disguise. They announce that they are government contractors, buy data on the open market from vendors just like them, and sell it to the government.
Journalism has identified several Israeli companies doing the same thing: a fake marketing company tied to a defense contractor, brokering the data to foreign governments.
How do federal contracts become public?
The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 required the government to publish a searchable database of federal awards. USAspending.gov, which launched in 2007, lists contracts by company, agency, and dollar amount. A separate registry, SAM.gov, holds the registrations that companies need to bid on federal work. Anyone can look up a vendor by name and see which agencies paid it.
Why does ad data end up on the market?
When an app loads an ad, an automated auction called real-time bidding sends details about the device to many bidders, sometimes including its location. Every bidder receives that data, though only one wins the ad slot. A 2022 report from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties described this broadcasting as a continuous flow of personal data in the United States and Europe.
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