Immigration and Customs Enforcement will soon be tracking cell phone data.
The immigration law enforcement agency has bought access to an “all-in-one” surveillance tool that gives it updated location data from hundreds of millions of phones, according to ICE documents obtained by 404 Media. ICE reportedly prefers the service because it also peels information from social media accounts.
Redacted documents make reference to two products, both produced by the contractor Penlink. They are known as Tangles and WebLoc. Both were created by an Israeli company called Cobwebs, which merged into Penlink in 2023. ICE has reportedly spent upwards of $5 million for access to the software, Forbes reported last month.
Previous attempts to monitor consumers’ location data for immigration enforcement were found to be illegal. A sweeping records request by the ACLU in 2022 found that DHS had obtained more than 336,000 location data points across North America by scraping app user data on hundreds of millions of phones during Donald Trump’s first term.
“Every American should be concerned that Trump’s hand-picked security force is once again buying and using location data without a warrant,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.
The decision to invest in Penlink’s products was informed by market research conducted in May and June by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, according to the documents.
WebLoc monitors the trends of mobile devices that have location data activated, and “how often they have been” to those locations, according to a government case study. Tangles creates a day-in-the-life profile of individuals based on mined social media data. It combines “posts, contacts, locations, and events they attended, combining it with any information leaked about them online,” Forbes reported, as well as captured images of a subject’s face that can then be searched for in databases by using Tangles’s AI-assisted tools.
ICE has praised Penlink’s products in internal documents, noting the tools forgo issues they’ve had with previous services, which would require analysts to “manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources.”
“Without an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive web investigations capabilities and automated analysis of location-based data within specified geographic areas, intelligence teams face significant operational challenges,” according to ICE documents published by 404 Media.
Read the full report at 404 Media.
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