Voyager Labs is an Israeli OSINT and social media intelligence vendor founded in 2012 by Avi Korenblum, headquartered in Tel Aviv with offices in Washington DC and London. The company’s products perform automated collection, analysis, and exploitation of public social media data for law enforcement, intelligence, and corporate security customers. Voyager Labs gained significant public attention in 2022 when internal documents disclosed through The Brennan Center for Justice litigation against the LAPD documented the company’s products in detailed operational use.
What it means in practice
Voyager Labs’ platforms automate the collection of social media profiles, posts, contacts, geolocation data, and other public web data into analytical workflows for investigators. The products include face recognition components, network analysis tools, and behavioural analysis modules. The platform builds detailed profiles of individuals and their networks from public web data, providing investigators with a unified view that would take individual analysts days or weeks to compile manually. The targeting in documented deployments has included political activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens flagged for investigative interest.
Specific things to know
The Brennan Center disclosure of Voyager Labs’ LAPD contract included internal company marketing material claiming the ability to identify someone as having a predisposition toward criminal behaviour based on social media analysis alone. The disclosure led to substantial controversy and the eventual termination of the LAPD contract. Voyager Labs subsequently filed a lawsuit against Meta in 2023, claiming the company’s platform changes were anti-competitive. Meta countersued, alleging that Voyager Labs had created 38,000 fake Facebook accounts to scrape user data, violating the platform’s terms of service.
Change today
If your social media presence is plausibly within Voyager Labs’ collection scope (which for any active social media user is the default), the operational answer is to recognise that the marginal information value of public posts is being aggregated against you whether or not you are a current investigative target. The defensive baseline is to treat all public-facing social media content as part of a permanent investigative record, and to operate any private or pseudonymous communications through compartmentalised channels.
Related articles
See our coverage of the Brennan Center disclosure, the Meta v Voyager Labs litigation, and the operational defences for individuals seeking to compartmentalise public from private digital identity.