Overview of Surveillance Tech in U.S.
Top 12 Technologies
Overview of Vendors in U.S.
Top 10 Vendors
Mapping Vendors and Tech
Shareholders Behind Vendors
192 unique vendors were identified in the Atlas of Surveillance dataset. The unique vendor with the highest number of occurrences is “unknown,” appearing in 4886 data-entries out of 10968. Nonetheless, 191 vendors are identified, and for productive vendor analysis, we do deeper network analyses into the top 25 most occurring known vendors.
Of the top 25 vendors, only 6 vendors have a public initial public offering (IPO) status, meaning that shares are on the market open to the public, which by extension is advantageous for open source investigations into the stakeholders of these vendors. 10 vendors are subsidiaries of parent companies, of which 9 are of public IPO status (Advent International is listed as private). Motorola Solutions stands interesting within this list. Motorola Solutions is both listed as a vendor, but also as the parent company of two other vendors of which are currently delisted: Vigilant Solutions and WatchGuard Video. That is not to say that Motorola Solutions isn’t a subsidiary itself, with Zebra Technologies as its parent company.
Considering both the original vendors and their parent companies, we have a total of 12 companies associated with the most prevalent surveillance technologies. This is to see if there’s an ownership monopoly on the companies that may hold highly sensitive data. The following alluvial graph displays the top 10 shareholders of each respective company on May 18th, 2023, to visualize if certain shareholders hold a monopoly in ownership. The data was collected from MarketScreener.
*Access to the .csv file containing shareholders of the 12 companies here
The investment management company, The Vanguard Group, Inc. is within the top 10 shareholders of all the 12 listed subsidiaries and parent companies. Following closely is SSgA Funds Management, Inc., which holds shares in 7 companies, while BlackRock Fund Advisors has investments in 6 listed companies. Vanguard Company, the second-largest investment firm globally, showcases a unique business structure that sets it apart: its shareholders are the very organizations in which it holds shares. This approach is believed to be a proactive measure by Vanguard to avoid conflicts of interest with other investment management firms (Edwards, 2023).
Only 8 shareholders of the list of 121 total shareholders are individuals, rather than large corporations. These names include: Jeff Bezos, Mackenzie T. Bezos, Patrick Smith, Ralph A. Clark, Tom Tyden Groos, Richard A. Nathan, Robert Alan Berman and the Dotan Family. The Dotan Family is the only shareholder who apparently remains anonymous, despite holding $2 million dollars in equities for Leonardo DRS, Inc. All individuals only hold shares for their respective companies of which they hold managerial/members of board positions, except for Tom Tyden (SoundThinking) and Dotan Family.