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/

  • @[email protected]
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    -204 months ago

    Alt title: Texas to spend $5 mil on software that is easily defeated by not bringing your cell phone to a riot.

    • @NocturnalMorning
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      654 months ago

      You’re missing the point. This is a gross violation of privacy rights.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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        -14 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

      • @[email protected]
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        -114 months ago

        It can be a waste of money and an invasion of privacy rights. The two are not mutually exclusive.

          • @[email protected]
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            4 months ago

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

            • @NocturnalMorning
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              4 months ago

              Do you think committing a crime is the only time this matters?

              Edit: Imagine being trans, gay, a minority, or just the wrong political party, and the police decide to go after you.

              • @BrianTheeBiscuiteer
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                64 months ago

                Not too long ago Texas was trying to charge parents of trans youths with child abuse.

              • @[email protected]
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                4 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
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                  54 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
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                    34 months ago

                    Good at avoiding false-negatives, not so good at avoiding false-positives. IMHO a 1% false-positive rate is unacceptable when the result is ruining someones life.

                  • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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                    -14 months ago

                    Because of stupid fucking memes and whiny furry ‘artists’ all of lemmy thinks the greatest danger of AI is someone not getting paid for their drawn porn getting scraped.

                    The REAL danger is AI can piece together nearly every aspect of your schedule, personality, income, pregnancy status, class, social circle, race, and medical history just by correlating anonymous data.

                    It’s already happening, hell it already happened 15 years ago and now they are just that much better.

                    But every FUCKDAMN top comment in this thread is a fucking joke or sarcasm

                  • @[email protected]
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                    -54 months ago

                    OK explain then. The AI flags you as a criminal and the cops give you a ticket for looking like a crim? The burden of proof is on the state. Now they have more 2x more shit to investigate which means more cop hours. Idk like I also hate the privacy aspect it this but it seems like a boondoggle that will also waste lots of taxpayer money and it would be good to attack it from two rhetorical angles.

            • @BrianTheeBiscuiteer
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              44 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)
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                -14 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        174 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          -34 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.

          • @[email protected]
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            124 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        44 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

          • @[email protected]
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            14 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.

              • @[email protected]
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                24 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.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    24 months ago

                    we should not be shifting the onus onto the general public in a situation like this.

                    If we are talking about how we would design our utopia (no sarcasm here) we absolutely shouldn’t. I am just pointing out that even in less than ideal reality you are not without options.

      • @[email protected]
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        -14 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)
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      14 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.