In June, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) signed an acquisition plan for a 5-year, nearly $5.3 million contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from tech firm PenLink, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer through a public information request. The deal is nearly twice as large as the company’s $2.7 million two-year contract with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Tangles is an artificial intelligence-powered web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark web. Tangles’ premier add-on feature, WebLoc, is controversial among digital privacy advocates. Any client who purchases access to WebLoc can track different mobile devices’ movements in a specific, virtual area selected by the user, through a capability called “geofencing.” Users of software like Tangles can do this without a search warrant or subpoena. (In a high-profile ruling, the Fifth Circuit recently held that police cannot compel companies like Google to hand over data obtained through geofencing.) Device-tracking services rely on location pings and other personal data pulled from smartphones, usually via in-app advertisers. Surveillance tech companies then buy this information from data brokers and sell access to it as part of their products.
WebLoc can even be used to access a device’s mobile ad ID, a string of numbers and letters that acts as a unique identifier for mobile devices in the ad marketing ecosystem, according to a US Office of Naval Intelligence procurement notice.
Wolfie Christl, a public interest researcher and digital rights activist based in Vienna, Austria, argues that data collected for a specific purpose, such as navigation or dating apps, should not be used by different parties for unrelated reasons. “It’s a disaster,” Christl told the Observer. “It’s the largest possible imaginable decontextualization of data. … This cannot be how our future digital society looks like.”
That is the real (overall) goal of shit like this.
Prevent people from using communication devices so that we can’t coordinate. It is a lot easier to go around busting heads if people aren’t recording you (or running over from the other street to fight back…). Same with the constant war on encryption.
And useful idiots (or incompetent plants) will love to talk about how the real problem is people are bringing those evidence collection boxes to protests and are coordinating rather than acting as a sea of individuals.
Yet again I’m not saying this isn’t bad, I guess I’m just surprised people are just catching on to this shit. Look into meshnets. Get a DV handycam. Keep it secret keep it safe. Practice good op sec. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
We aren’t just catching on. You’re letting your smug cloud your judgment here. This is not some revelation for the rest of us that you are already wise to.
This is a new tool that ratchets up these practices. It’s also not a 3 letter federal agency but a wildly partisan state government. This makes the problem worse. No one thinks it’s new.
No. What you are doing is trying to act smug while spreading the exact same end goal of isolating people.
A hidden gopro does not stop cops from beating you to death and saying you had a gun. A bunch of phones that are recording “to the cloud” does that. Similarly, a hidden camera does not let you communicate with other protesters and just isolates you and weakens the movement as a whole.
Please listen to others rather than being a useful idiot for the fascists.