Texas State Police takes cue from ICE, invests heavily on controversial surveillance technology

During the last few months, cutting-edge technology has increasingly made its way to border surveillance, with everything from risk-based facial recognition to surveillance blimps being used by authorities to control ports of entry in the southern border.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been at the forefront, investing $2.7 million on a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles, an artificial intelligence-powered web platform which, among other features, can track different mobile devices' movements in a specific, virtual area without a search warrant or subpoena.

Tangles has become so popular in fact that now The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has secured a five-year, $5.3 million contract for the technology, a contract that is almost twice as large as ICE's two-year contract, the Texas Observer reports.

Tangles is a product of Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli-founded cybersecurity company acquired by PenLink in 2023. Cobwebs Technologies has marketed its tools for combating terrorism, drug smuggling, and money laundering, though it has faced accusations of operating as a surveillance-for-hire outfit. Meta, formerly Facebook, banned Cobwebs in 2021, along with other firms it identified as part of an online surveillance ecosystem, citing concerns that its clients were targeting activists and opposition politicians.

Privacy advocates and legal experts have raised concerns about the implications of such surveillance tools as well. They compare the use of location data from apps to issues highlighted in the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Carpenter v. United States, which requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant for cell phone location data from service providers.

Companies like Tangles have justified selling phone location information through data brokers by arguing that mobile ad IDs are anonymous. But critics like Nate Wessler, the attorney who argued the Carpenter case, thinks that's just a flat out lie:

"These companies absolutely trot that out as one of their defenses, and it is pure poppycock. ... It's transparently a ridiculous defense, because the entire thing that they're selling is the ability to track phones and to be able to figure out where particular phones are going."

In fact, Carpenter claims that location data harvested from apps can be even more invasive: "you can tell just as much about somebody's GPS history from their apps as you can from their cell phone location data from their phone provider and in some cases, you can tell more."

The sprawling report by The Texas Observer also points out that Tangles has not only been servicing clients inside the country, but has also spread its wings abroad:

"Agencies across the globe have used Tangles. From at least 2021 to 2022, Salvadoran police used it, according to the investigative outlet El Faro. Police in Mexico have also purchased the software, according to Excelsior, a Mexico City newspaper."