Texas State Police Purchased Israeli Phone-Tracking Software For "Border Emergency"
The Texas Department of Public Safety bought access to powerful software able to locating and iTagPro Device following people by way of their telephones as part of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s "border safety disaster" efforts, in line with documents reviewed by The Intercept. In 2021, Abbott proclaimed that the "surge of individuals unlawfully crossing the Texas-Mexico border posed an ongoing and imminent risk of disaster" to the state and its residents. Among other results, the disaster declaration opened a spigot of authorities money to quite a lot of private companies ostensibly paid to help patrol and blockade the state’s border with Mexico. One of the non-public firms that obtained in on the money disbursements was Cobwebs Technologies, just a little-known Israeli surveillance contractor. Cobwebs’s marquee product, the surveillance platform Tangles, gives its users a bounty of various instruments for monitoring individuals as they navigate both the web and iTagPro Device the true world, synthesizing social media posts, app exercise, facial recognition, and phone tracking.
News of the acquisition comes as Abbott’s border crackdown escalated to new heights, following a Department of Public Safety whistleblower’s report of extreme mistreatment of migrants by state legislation enforcement and a Justice Department lawsuit over the governor’s deployment of razor wire on the Rio Grande. The Cobwebs documents present that Abbott’s efforts to usurp the federal government’s constitutional authority to conduct immigration enforcement have prolonged into the electronic realm as well. The implications could attain far beyond the geographic bounds of the border and into the personal lives of residents and noncitizens alike. "Government companies systematically buying information that has been initially collected to offer consumer companies or digital advertising represents the worst possible form of decontextualized misuse of personal data," Wolfie Christl, a privacy researcher who tracks knowledge brokerages, advised The Intercept. We’re independent of company pursuits - and powered by members. Join Our Newsletter Thanks For Joining!
Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. Will you're taking the following step to support our independent journalism by changing into a member of The Intercept? By signing up, I conform to obtain emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Like its opponents on the earth of software monitoring tools, Cobwebs - which sells its providers to the Department of Homeland Security, iTagPro Device the IRS, and a variety of undisclosed company customers - lets its shoppers track the movements of personal individuals with out a courtroom order. Instead of needing a judge’s signal-off, these monitoring providers depend on bulk-purchasing location pings pulled from smartphones, often via unscrupulous mobile apps or in-app advertisers, an unregulated and iTagPro Smart Tracker more and more pervasive type of location tracking. In August 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism division purchased a 12 months of Tangles entry for $198,000, according to contract paperwork, obtained by a public data request by Tech Inquiry, a watchdog and iTagPro Device research organization, iTagPro Tracker and shared with The Intercept.
The state has renewed its Tangles subscription twice since then, though the invention that Cobwebs did not pay taxes owed in Texas briefly derailed the renewal final April, in line with an e mail included within the records request.