A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.
Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for.
“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media.
The people should start buying this data to identify ICE personnel involved in incidents. It’s not like you need to be law enforcement to get access to this. You just need money.
It wasn’t that long ago we had phones that couldn’t leave the house. This choice does still exist for us.
US a surveillance regime as much as North Korea, China and Russia.
Your phone company is selling this data. Your tax dollars are then used to spy on you. But let’s place the blame with the enablers. If the data wasn’t being sold, ICE couldn’t buy it with your money.
Privacy is a myth in the United States.
There’s plenty of blame to go around on this, no need to only go after one party in the whole chain that allows this to occur.
Privacy is a myth everywhere that you use social media, cellular connected GPS trackers (aka phones), drive around with unique number plates while OCR capable video cameras take continuous records of which plates passed by them and when. Yes, it’s bad in the US. Is it better anywhere else?
Do not take your phone to protests/rallies/organized events. Do not turn it off and take it with you thinking it’s okay, they will know when and where you turned it off. Jury is still out if modern phones truly turn off as well. Use a regular camera for taking pictures, take lots of them, get faces, IDs, anything if you can of ICE. Let them start the violence first.
One of the best things about phones with batteries you can replace. You can take them out of the phone as well.
Yep, I miss removable batteries. Not just for the ability to replace the batteries (e.g. due to degradation) but also to be able to completely remove power from the device.
Pardon the pedanticness: Phones do NOT completely power down. The jury is out on if they are still traceable in “standby”/psuedo-powered off mode. The generally accepted advice is to treat them like they are still tracable.
Wasn’t sure if they were or not, why I mentioned the jury was out on it. Regardless, leave your phone at home.
“This is wrong” — Lucius Fox, The Dark Knight
Prescient, and also an example of copaganda/how corporate media conditions the public to accept this shit because the “good guy” is the one using it.
I mean, they acknowledge that it’s wrong, and they acknowledge that Bruce Wayne is not stable enough to have power by having him give the power to Lucius.
Not all scenes are so one-note that it only ever has one meaning or message.
Lucius shouldn’t have that power either! It’s not an issue of being “stable enough;” it’s an issue of anyone having it. Frankly, your argument kinda proves my point.
It’s analogous to a limited hangout. Sure, they acknowledge it’s wrong, but that doesn’t stop them from doing it and they suffer no bad consequences for that choice. Really, what’s the Aesop people are actually going to take from it? The one based on the demonstrably empty words, or the one based on the actions?
I thought this was going to say they were deploying Stingrays in neighborhoods. Pretty sure this is worse, because at least a Stingray requires something be physically present. Fuck all of this.
Yeah, same. I setup an Orbic with RayHunter exactly for this reason. I took that with me when I’ve gone by protests just to see if there’s one present. Then, if in the clear, shut down my personal devices and attended. I’m paranoid like that I guess…
Setup Meshtastic nodes too.
Having the ability to communicate without using cellular infrastructure is incredibly useful, especially during natural disasters (which ICE certainly qualifies).
Damn I’ll check that out
Thanks for including the app list!
FYI, the most relevant information to avoiding your phone showing up in ICE’s rented databases is how they are getting the location data:
The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.
This includes a link to a prior 404 story that may have a list of apps, but it’s paywalled and none of the archive sites seem to have it indexed: https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/
This is the link to the full list provided in that article but it may also be paywalled by 404 Media which I am a subscriber to. It’s also got more than
1K10K entries on it.A lot of these seem to be mobile games, fitness apps, photo editing apps, and prayer apps though.
In case you’re wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/
I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.
My SMS app was on it. Which makes me sad because Textra was dope, I’ve moved to qksms.
Thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for. More than *10K entries, by the look of it…
Yeah. Typo. Seems to happen a lot when I’m typing fast on a phone screen. Sorry.
These are all presumably Android apps. Is there a list for IOS apps?
404Media say that their list is a comprehensive list of both Android and iOS apps. So no as far as I know that is the list.
And, added it to the description.
Not paywalled.
In July 2023, PenLink merged with Israeli surveillance contractor Cobwebs Technologies
Tangles is a web platform, originally developed and sold by Israeli firm Cobwebs Technologies, that scrapes data from the open web, deep web, and dark web, as well as allowing for the tracking of mobile devices within a user-designated area, in a process known as “geofencing,” through an optional add-on feature called WebLoc.
Cobwebs and how the spying is going global.
Laughs in root level location spoofing module
How does anything in your phone “spoof” triangulation by cell towers? Just tell them “This phone’s not actually connected to you”?
That’s not what they’re using. Apps that sell location data is the source.
Oh, and I have a removable battery for avoiding triangulation if need be.
You can also get a faraday bag.
