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.”

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240827115133/https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-dps-surveillance-tangle-cobwebs/

      • 14th_cylon@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Riots are also rarely planned in the US so so I doubt even a majority of the participants will remember not to bring a phone with them.

        It also impacts one of the most powerful tools we have for accountability: the cameras on our phones.

        Airplane mode

          • 14th_cylon@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            I am not talking about other people, I am saying that any individual who happens to become part of some unplanned ethical riot, has a chance to not be tracked through their phone and still use its function which don’t require any external connection, like camera.

            Whether they decide to use it or not is really up to them.

              • 14th_cylon@lemm.eeEnglish
                0·
                9 months ago

                you should be pushing back against the laws > and practices that make you want to tell people that to begin with.

                I am not disputing this part - I am just saying, there is something you can do even when the situation is not planned. I am not saying it is easy or anything, I am saying you are not without options.

                I am not advocating for state survaillence.

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        That is the real (overall) goal of shit like this.

        Prevent people from using communication devices so that we can’t coordinate. It is a lot easier to go around busting heads if people aren’t recording you (or running over from the other street to fight back…). Same with the constant war on encryption.

        And useful idiots (or incompetent plants) will love to talk about how the real problem is people are bringing those evidence collection boxes to protests and are coordinating rather than acting as a sea of individuals.

        • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          Yet again I’m not saying this isn’t bad, I guess I’m just surprised people are just catching on to this shit. Look into meshnets. Get a DV handycam. Keep it secret keep it safe. Practice good op sec. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

          • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            No. What you are doing is trying to act smug while spreading the exact same end goal of isolating people.

            A hidden gopro does not stop cops from beating you to death and saying you had a gun. A bunch of phones that are recording “to the cloud” does that. Similarly, a hidden camera does not let you communicate with other protesters and just isolates you and weakens the movement as a whole.

            Please listen to others rather than being a useful idiot for the fascists.

      • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        I guess? I mean the feds were already doing this to the capital insurrectionists, but yeah it does suck that Texas is now doing it too. I suggest everyone who’s getting pissed at me reevaluate their threat models instead and maybe go get a DV handycam from goodwill

    • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Do you think that’s the only fucking time they’ll use this?

      We are in the middle of the most dangerous liberty encroachment in our living memory and literally none of you are thinking beyond your own little frameworks and by the time we get some advocacy on this it’ll be too late.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Almost no one in this thread cares and they are all memeing like this is an ‘ow my balls’ clip.

        Frankly I’m starting to think we deserve this

          • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            Sorry if there was confusion. My main point: leave your narc device at home when doing crimes. Have a good day!

              • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                0·
                9 months ago

                No, also probably when the AI pattern matches your behavior to a criminal’s behavior because you live in the same neighborhood.

                Again I’m not saying this isn’t bad, I’m saying Texas has no idea what they bought or how to use it. The only practical way to use it is the way the feds do, and if they try the AI shit it will likely fuck them legally speaking at the federal level OR orange Julius wins and the NSA starts just giving this shit to Texas, so this will all be moot.

                I think they got grifted out of $5 mil by AI hucksters.

                • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  0·
                  9 months ago

                  I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about. This is exactly the kind of thing AI is good at, pattern recognition.

            • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              9 months ago

              Correlation is not causation. This only indicates a person is in the general area [during a crime] and not that they perpetrated it. People go to jail, wrongfully, with less evidence than this.

              • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                9 months ago

                they’re not going to use it as evidence in an arrest, they are going to use it to target social dissidents, which in Texas’s case, is everyone who isn’t a fascist.

                They know they can’t use it as evidence, but they also know ten thousand other cruel and vicious things they can get away with.

  • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Every 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.

    • oatscoop@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      How dare people cope with something horrible by making jokes. Everyone knows it’s impossible to make those jokes while simultaneously being horrified by and pushing back against the thing they’re joking about.

    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Are they? I see ones like

      Small government

      This is sarcastic, but it’s as much of a joke as Stephen Colbert - it’s touching on something pretty real. Not sure what’s wrong with pointing out hypocrisy.

        • recapitated@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          Let me reframe my previous comment:

          If you don’t want to network in person locally, you will need to find a forum whose sole purpose is activism and direct action.

          It will not be brought to you, and you will not be recruited. You have to actively go seek it out.

          The forum you’re on now is called “technology”. Similar ones, like “news” or literally any other topic that doesn’t solely focus on mobilizing activists will not get you what you’re asking for here.

        • recapitated@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          I appreciate your position. I don’t think you’re going to start a cultural revolution on any comment section. If you’re looking for a place to make real change, you need to network with local communities.

          The the best you’ll get for “town square” value from internet forums is the expression of sentiment. People are angry, like you are, and they are using humor to literally reframe the narrative to point out the state’s fallacy.

          • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            . I don’t think you’re going to start a cultural revolution on any comment section

            Where the fuck are they supposed to start then? The internet is our current social method, and places like lemmy the subversive coffee shops where people whisper about putting rags in vodka bottles.

            Look a bunch of rancid enthostatists used the internet to organize fucking armed and trained militias that are operating RIGHT NOW, and most of them organized on the web and dark web.

            I’m tired of being fractured and ineffectual shitposters all wasting energy telling everyone how terrible every decision they’ve ever made is. It’s DESIGNED to keep us from organizing.

            Reddit used to be ideas, I literally watched it in realtime turn to shitposts.

            Lemmy is going that same way at a ridiculously rapid pace, LARGELY in fact due to the shitposting and constant thought terminating cliches thrown out as some kind of profound knowledge.

            • recapitated@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              9 months ago

              I can’t speak to your experience but I’ve been farting around on the Internet since the mid 90s and I promise nothing ever changes.

              Smaller communities tend to be more concise, that is true.

              But what you have here is the hand you’re dealt. Complaining isn’t going to change anything any more thank joking. You can be the change you seek here by suggesting a course of action that isn’t asking others to suggest a course of action to you. If you’re seeking a course of action, you can try asking here.

              But commenters on tech news aren’t likely to be expert activists, especially in whatever issue is your top concern.

              My best advice to you is

              • practice acceptance of reality, not as defeat but as the first step to understanding and deciding an action

              • determine how much capacity you, as a person, have to contribute to a cause

              • determine one cause you care about and can be effective at contributing to

              After doing those things, SEEK OUT like minded groups who have leadership and self discipline and are effective.

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    So 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.

      • 800XL@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Texas law enforcement doesn’t need a language model to blame false positives on. They can false positively shoot whomever they want with no reprocussion.

      • 800XL@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        That is the more likely scenario sadly, and the cops will say “don’t blame us those kids got killed, we just listened to the AI” and some judge will say “yea, that’s ok . the officer did what he was told like he is supposed to, unlike that bus of kindergarteners who didn’t lie down and put their hands behind their heads when commanded”

        But after they install cameras everywhere and after a bunch of misses despite surveillence on everyone they actually get someone the amount of self back patting and chest puffing will be off the charts.

  • index@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Make sure to support the government in the next elections so they can spend more public money on “security”

    • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      And they’ll “catch” just enough “criminals” (read: non-white people) to give Fox News some metrics they can blow out of proportion for the gullible, rural rubes.

    • Gerudo@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      I’m fairly in tune with my privacy but didn’t even know about this one. I assumed I had disabled all this when I setup my phone.

  • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    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.

    As if you needed more reasons to use an ad-blocker.

      • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        This is why I’m so adamant about privacy. The govt has already been caught several times buying up data from data brokers for “predictive policing”. They’ve been using it in Pasco County, FL to harrass people day and night into either committing a crime so they can arrest them or leaving town. Once you put that data out there, there’s no getting rid of it.

  • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    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?