Inside America's Secretive $2 Billion Research Hub - Collecting Fingerprints From Facebook, Hacking Smartwatches And Fighting Covid-19

Whether it’s an invisible Aston Martin or an exploding pen, whenever James Bond needs a high-tech edge, he heads right for Q and his secretive MI6 lab. In the real world, American agents often rely on a less clandestine, but far better-funded group. Armed with 8,000 employees and an annual budget of between $1 billion and $2 billion of taxpayers’ money, Mitre Corp., a government-linked Skunk Works, has been making bleeding-edge breakthroughs for U.S. agencies for more than six decades. With its HQ housed in four towers atop a hill in McLean, Virginia, Mitre’s research centers employ some of the nation’s leading computer scientists and engineers to build digital tools for America’s top military, security and intelligence organizations.

Among the government’s wilder Mitre orders: a prototype tool that can hack into smartwatches, fitness trackers and home thermometers for the purposes of homeland security; software to collect human fingerprints from social media websites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for the FBI; support in building what the FBI calls the biggest database of human anatomy and criminal history in the world; and a study to determine whether someone’s body odor can show they’re lying.

These varied, multimillion-dollar projects, revealed in hundreds of pages of contract details obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as interviews with former Mitre executives and government officials, provide just a glimpse into this sprawling contractor’s secretive world. Mitre’s influence goes far beyond its vast tech development; it’s also a major consultant for myriad government agencies on how best to deploy tech and policy strategies. Its latest gig: helping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) and Homeland Security's ominously named Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction office craft sweeping plans for curtailing the Covid-19 pandemic.

“If there’s a national security or public interest [problem], Mitre probably has a hand in it,” says former Mitre cybersecurity engineer Matt Edman. Bald, bearded and baritone-voiced, Edman could have worked at his pick of hot Silicon Valley tech companies, but instead focused his talents on challenging national security problems. During his time at Mitre, Edman partnered with the FBI, using his hacking skills to help take down the infamous Silk Road dark web drug bazaar. Shortly after he left Mitre, he was allowed to finish the job in October 2013, and was in Reykjavik, Iceland, alongside FBI agent Ilhwan Yum, to shutter the site run by the Dread Pirate Roberts (real name: Ross Ulbricht), who is now serving a life sentence. Edman was also at Mitre when it helped the FBI hack and monitor users of multiple child exploitation sites as part of Operation Torpedo, in what then attorney general Loretta Lynch hailed as a landmark dark web investigation.

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