Texas State Police Purchased Israeli Phone-Tracking Software For "Border Emergency"
The Texas Department of Public Safety bought entry to highly effective software program capable of locating and following individuals via their phones as part of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s "border security disaster" efforts, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. In 2021, Abbott proclaimed that the "surge of people unlawfully crossing the Texas-Mexico border posed an ongoing and imminent menace of disaster" to the state and its residents. Among different effects, the disaster declaration opened a spigot of government cash to a wide range of personal corporations ostensibly paid to help patrol and blockade the state’s border with Mexico. One of many non-public companies that bought in on the money disbursements was Cobwebs Technologies, just a little-known Israeli surveillance contractor. Cobwebs’s marquee product, ItagPro the surveillance platform Tangles, offers its customers a bounty of various tools for monitoring folks as they navigate both the internet and the true world, synthesizing social media posts, app activity, iTagPro shop facial recognition, and phone tracking.
News of the purchase 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 law enforcement and a Justice Department lawsuit over the governor’s deployment of razor wire on the Rio Grande. The Cobwebs documents show that Abbott’s efforts to usurp the federal government’s constitutional authority to conduct immigration enforcement have extended into the electronic realm as properly. The implications could reach far beyond the geographic bounds of the border and into the personal lives of citizens and noncitizens alike. "Government agencies systematically shopping for data that has been originally collected to supply client services or digital promoting represents the worst possible sort of decontextualized misuse of personal information," Wolfie Christl, a privateness researcher who tracks information brokerages, instructed The Intercept. We’re independent of corporate interests - and powered by members. Join Our Newsletter Thank you For Joining!
Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. Will you take the following step to help our unbiased journalism by becoming 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 planet of software program tracking instruments, Cobwebs - which sells its providers to the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and quite a lot of undisclosed corporate clients - lets its shoppers track the movements of personal people and not using a courtroom order. Instead of needing a judge’s signal-off, these monitoring services depend on bulk-purchasing location pings pulled from smartphones, iTagPro online typically through unscrupulous mobile apps or in-app advertisers, an unregulated and increasingly pervasive form of location monitoring. In August 2021, iTagPro shop the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism division purchased a yr of Tangles entry for $198,000, based on contract paperwork, obtained by a public information request by Tech Inquiry, a watchdog and analysis organization, and shared with The Intercept.
The state has renewed its Tangles subscription twice since then, though the discovery that Cobwebs did not pay taxes owed in Texas briefly derailed the renewal final April, in line with an e-mail included within the data request. A second 2021 contract document shared with The Intercept shows DPS bought "unlimited" entry to Clearview AI, a controversial face recognition platform that matches people to tens of billions of images scraped from the web. The catastrophe declaration, which spans greater than 50 counties, is a part of an ongoing marketing campaign by Abbott that has pushed the bounds of civil liberties in Texas, mainly by way of the governor’s use of the Department of Public Safety. Under Operation Lone Star, Abbott has spent $4.5 billion surging 10,000 Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard personnel to the border as part of a stated effort to beat again a migrant "invasion," which he claims is aided and abetted by President Joe Biden.
The ensuing venture has been riddled with scandal, including migrants languishing for months in state jails without prices and a number of other suicides among personnel deployed on the mission. On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department sued Texas over Abbott’s deployment of floating barricades on the Rio Grande. Despite Abbott’s repeated claims that Operation Lone Star is a targeted effort targeted specifically on crimes at the border, a joint investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and the Marshall Project last 12 months discovered that the state was counting arrests and drug charges removed from the U.S-Mexico divide and unrelated to the Operation Lone Star mandate. Records obtained by the news organizations final summer season showed that the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Abbott’s operation. The standing of the investigation has not been made public. Where the Department of Public Safety’s access to Tangles’s powerful cellphone monitoring software program will match into Abbott’s controversial border enforcement regime stays uncertain.
