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.”
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Alt title: Texas to spend $5 mil on software that is easily defeated by not bringing your cell phone to a riot.
You're missing the point. This is a gross violation of privacy rights.
It can be a waste of money and an invasion of privacy rights. The two are not mutually exclusive.
That's not what you said..
Sorry if there was confusion. My main point: leave your narc device at home when doing crimes. Have a good day!
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.
I mean, this is texas.
Imagine being a perfectly normal cishet woman.
Sad, but true
Not too long ago Texas was trying to charge parents of trans youths with child abuse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you like know anything about how our system works? People get slapped with frivolous tickets and lawsuits every day, and cops don't have to deal with shit from it.
In the Texas counties I'm most familiar with, if you're arrested and they don't have a good case, they just keep resetting court dates for years instead of going ahead with the process. If you can't afford a bond, you'll be in jail that whole time (which pressures people to take plea deals), if you can secure a bond, you're out, but with limited rights and a whole lot of hassles to deal with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Airplane mode
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.
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.
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.
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