Texas State Police Gear Up for Massive Expansion of Surveillance Tech
Texas State Police Gear Up for Massive Expansion of Surveillance Tech
DPS plans to spend millions in taxpayer dollars on a controversial software, used first as part of Governor Abbott’s border crackdown, to “disrupt potential domestic terrorism.”
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.”
Remember that one time in Batman where they built a mass surveillance program using phones and decided it was so morally objectionable they immediately destroyed it after?
56EFF recommendation on Ad Tracking: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/how-disable-ad-id-tracking-ios-and-android-and-why-you-should-do-it-now
53Small government.
16Freedom rations are going up this week from 10 to 8!
15So they only needed to say that all this shit is completely depersonalized and so on for the time being, until they did this like thieves they are.
Typical.
It's also really funny when people say "oh but it's a democratic country with institutions and rule of law doing this, so it's fine", because this is how a country stops being that. Well, people don't say this about anything in USA, they usually say this about the EU.
This is why we the humanity can't have nice things.
Because when we build a nice thing, some jerks decide that we can break it and still have it, because we "already have it". Completely illogical, but all proponents of government control against freedom and rules-based order against humanism are like that.
10Every fucking top comment in this thread are all jokes.
We're officially reddit, there isn't any more intelligent discourse here about important topics, it's all just fucking memes and jokes and 'lol the world is fucked'
Every one of you disgusts me, you are 75% of the reason they KEEP getting away with this shit.
Because they know ALL you will EVER do is meme and joke.
6Because Laredo wasn't dystopian enough already.
5China is number one. The USA needs to be number one. The USA wants to be China. Illuminati Confirmed.
3