SPYING ON YOU

I'm republishing this content (with minor edits) by Devon Nicholas (beingdevonnicholas) since I, and my tech friends regard his content extremely important to our Personal and National Security.

Congress forced the sale of TikTok because a Chinese company 

knew your behavioral data, your viewing habits, and your preferences.  

But, here's a  company called Amadeus IT Group, headquartered in Madrid, Spain

Amadeus IT Group 

The largest travel technology company in the world. They run the global reservation and booking infrastructure that most airlines, hotels, and travel agencies operate on. More than 40% of the global travel distribution market.

Every time you book a flight through a travel agency or booking site, there’s a good chance Amadeus processed that transaction. You just didn’t know it.

Here is what Amadeus collects every time that happens:
- Your name
- Your passport number 

- Your birth date
- Your nationality
- Your payment information
- Your itinerary — where you’re going and when
- Your dietary preferences
- Your special requests
- Your hotel loyalty records
- Even your frequent flyer miles

Amadeus’s own privacy documents confirm this.
They currently hold more than 12 billion records. 

You are in there. 

Most of us are.

Spain’s data protection agency fined Amadeus €14.4 million.

The reason: They were profiling passengers by 

1. Combining booking records with hotel loyalty data. 
2. Cross-referencing your 2019 travel records with where you stayed. 
3. The investigation found that most travelers had no idea Amadeus was processing their data at all. Because Amadeus is invisible by design..

The airline sees you. 

The hotel sees you. 

The government sees you. 

Amadeus sees all this simultaneously 

and you never signed anything with them.

Amadeus just announced it is acquiring a company called IDEMIA Public Security for €1.2 billion. 

IDEMIA is 

1. The exclusive vendor for facial recognition at US airports. 
2. Runs the TSA PreCheck biometric enrollment for 17 million Americans.
3. Holds the fingerprint and biometric databases for multiple US states.
4. Screens every passport and visa applicant — 30 million+ Americans per year.
5. The State Department gave IDEMIA an exclusive contract in 2018 with no competitive bidding.

                The justification: switching vendors would be too complicated

                                        So they didn’t.

Let me put this together for you. 

By mid-2007, Amadeus, a Spanish publicly traded company, had 12 billion records 

and will have reocords of you, when this acquisition closes: 

1. When you travel
2. where you go, 
3. How you pay, 
4. What you eat on planes, and 
5. What hotels you stay in
6. Your face
7. Your fingerprints, and 
8. Your biometric identity. 
9. All of it held by a Spanish publicly traded company!

Amedeus’ largest shareholders include BlackRock, Fidelity, and Invesco; any of those sound familiar? 

(cough cough* BlackRock) 

BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager

 with $12.5 trillion in assets under management as of 2025

Amadeus’s infrastructure was built during Trump’s first term through contracts that were no- bid.

Oh, one more thing…

                IDEMIA already has a relationship with ICE

(ED NOTE:  Amid a rise in mixed migration to US and European borders, dating back to 1990 in the US case and more recently in Europe, governments have explored ways to increase removals/returns of people found to be resident without authorization. 

The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBBA) allocated $5.2 billion for modernizing ICE with real-time facial and fingerprint checks, and $673 million for biometric entry-exit systems at all ports of entry. 

IDEMIA is the infrastructure at those ports. 

The bill that passed is a direct funding mechanism for their existing contracts

So when Amadeus closes this acquisition in 2027, a single Spanish company will hold 

1) Your travel records, 

2) Your biometric identity, and 

3) A contract relationship with the agency that is currently arresting some people for exercising their constitutional rights.

Source: 

OBBBA biometric provisions, July 2025. 

IDEMIA/DHS joint webinar, August 2024 

Biometric Update reporting, May 2026

Congress held emergency hearings about TikTok.
They passed legislation to force the sale

THE ARGUMENT

A foreign company should not have access to 

Americans’ behavioral data and personal information. 

                                    TikTok knew what videos you watched.

        But, 

Amadeus knows your passport number, your face, your fingerprints, your travel history, your payment information, and your hotel preferences. 12 billion records that can be cross referenced before you finishing packing for your trip.

FOOTNOTE

The acquisition closes in mid-2027.

We still have time to stop it.

But only if people know this is happening; now you do. 

Please like, share and repost so we can get the word out. 

NO ONE, (not a private company, not a public company, not the government) 

should have that amount of information about all American citizens.

 So let’s stop them.

                            We the People are the most powerful force on Earth

                                these companies are no match for us.

Amadeus GDS Privacy Notice —

 amadeus.com  confirms data collected)

Amadeus | It’s how travel works.

Spain AEPD €14.4M fine — May 26, 2026 

(confirms 12 billion records and profiling)

Amadeus acquires IDEMIA Public Security for €1.2B — April 29, 2026 

(Amadeus press release)

IDEMIA exclusive passport contract — FedScoop, June 2018

IDEMIA TSA PreCheck contract HSTS0217COIA095 

— federal procurement record 2017

IDEMIA exclusive airport facial recognition 

— Private Equity Detention and Surveillance Tracker

                                             All of it is public.
                                     All of it was always there 
                                    Someone just had to read it.

                                Related threads

ronc.astro

05/04/26

The system reveals its logic: convenience is the alibi, integration the reality. Amadeus fuses booking data with Idemia Public Security to produce a unified biometric subject—your face as passport, profile, and product. 

                                    What appears as frictionless travel is, in truth,

                    the quiet abolition of anonymity through infrastructural design.

How US Helps Foreign Workers Take American Jobs

By Steven Edginton, 

RealClearInvestigations
May 21, 2026

AP

[This post is a condensed version of a RealClearInvestigations article by Steven Edginton; I highly recommend  this link for deep analyses of prevalent issues]

US tech workers are at the center of a battle brewing in Washington, DC, over reforming the troubled H-1B visa program, designed to fill highly skilled positions when qualified American workers can’t be found. The controversy pits tough-on-immigration Republicans and some Democrats against the most formidable of opponents – Big Tech, the primary beneficiary of a program considered by critics to be little more than a pipeline of cheap labor.

In the last few decades, the California dream has gone global as US tech firms have filled their ranks and C-suites with employees born in India or Malaysia.

Intel replaced its US executives with Lip-Bu Tan 

Microsoft is led by Satya Nadella

Alphabet Inc. by Sundar Pichai

Adobe by ShantanuNarayen; 

IBM by Arvind Krishna

YouTube by Neal Mohan; 

T-Mobile US by Srinivas Gopalan

According to think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley, two-thirds of Silicon Valley’s nearly 400,000 tech jobs are now held by persons  born abroad.  

Today, more tech workers were born in India (23%) and China (18%) combined than in the US (34%). 

Low-cost Asian talent has clearly helped fuel profits. But the downside to this tech boom is the sidelining of US workers thanks to the H-1B visa program; it's no longer working as intended. 

Created in 1990, the federal H-1B program has become a vehicle for employers,  in the US tech centers to recruit much cheaper foreign labor at the expense of US tech workers. 

The H-1B program spans multiple industries, but it’s overwhelmingly concentrated in tech. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tata Consultancy, and Google were the biggest visa users., Amazon alone recorded more than 13,000 applications. 

The savings from hiring foreign workers hard to resist, e.g., software developers accounts for 38% of all H-1B visa workers.  These foreign software developers earn about 30% less than their US counterparts. 

These tech jobs pay six figures and the savings quickly add up. Companiescab save nearly $100,000 per worker over six years by hiring an H-1B worker rather than an American. This arrangement redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants. 

The H-1B law is vaguely written and easy to exploit.  The congressional basis of the law – to fill highly skilled jobs with foreigners if Americans aren’t available – is fiction. 

One of the most glaring weaknesses of the law is that most companies using these visas are not required to demonstrate that they were unable to find qualified American workers. Only companies with more than 15% of their workforce on H-1Bs must make efforts to recruit US citizens, e.g., public announcements of open positions.  

Companies must pay foreign workers at least the “prevailing wage” , a provision that should reduce the incentive to hire employees from Asia. 

But the process of self-reporting is easy to manipulate since salaries are calculated using broad regional averages that don't reflect real technology sector market wages. 

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reported that when the annual cap of 85,000 new visas was combined with renewals, 2025 was a banner year with 406,348 approved visas. Seventy percent of those visas were issued to Indians, compared to a total of 275,317 visa approvals in 2015.

The Trump administration has now restricted the program. The USCIS announced a new $100,000 fee that companies must pay per new H-1B worker living outside the US. Some immigration experts estimate the fee may lead to a 30% to 50% decline in new visa applications. 

Since Tech companies don't want to pay the $100,000 fees, But their workaround is to exploit visas for workers already in the US, e.g., students who transfer from other visa types to H-1Bs, using the Optional Practical Training program to move into the H-1B pipeline without paying that fee.

Critics of these visas point to waves of layoffs, today driven by AI, accompanied by the growth in H-1Bs. The labor shortage is nothing more than a fig leaf.

1) Google fired 951 US workers in 2024, but hired 1,058 new H-1B workers

2) Apple fired 735 US workers in 2024, but hired 864 new H-1B workers

3) Microsoft fired US 3,426 workers from 2022-24, but hired 3,259 new H-1Bs  

The Economic Policy Institute reported the top 30 H-1B employers hired more than 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022 but fired at least 85,000 employees during the same period. 

Critics say H-1B visas also provide a captive workforce. Employers can sponsor visa holders for permanent residency, and many workers rely on keeping their jobs in order to remain in the US. This dynamic discourages employees from changing companies or demanding higher wages, similar to Indentured Servitude.

Favoritism contributes to foreign dominance of the tech sector. When foreign-born take on leadership roles, including CEO, they likely tap their own indigenous networks.  Professional hiring is a thing of the past, with Indians dominating the system.

A former Google engineer noted that Indian employees help each other share interview questions, creating their own little network.

                                                                        SOLUTION?

One reform targets the ineffective prevailing wage requirement allowings firms to underpay foreign workers. The refromwould increase the minimum salary requirement for H-1B workers to be much higher than the current pay scale. That would remove the financial incentive to replace US-born workers. 

Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman representing much of Silicon Valley, said on the All-In podcast last year that “there’s definitely abuse [that] needs to be corrected” in the H-1B program. Khanna said a new prevailing wage standard would be a reform he could support. 

But such legislation would raise labor costs and be opposed by Big Tech with deep pockets with millions of dollars to influence Congress.