Texas State Police Purchased Israeli Phone-Tracking Software For "Border Emergency" > 자유게시판

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The Texas Department of Public Safety purchased entry to highly effective software program capable of locating and following folks by their telephones as a part of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s "border security disaster" efforts, in keeping with documents reviewed by The Intercept. In 2021, Abbott proclaimed that the "surge of people unlawfully crossing the Texas-Mexico border posed an ongoing and imminent menace of disaster" to the state and its residents. Among other effects, the catastrophe declaration opened a spigot of authorities cash to a wide range of non-public corporations ostensibly paid to assist patrol and blockade the state’s border with Mexico. One of many private firms that got in on the money disbursements was Cobwebs Technologies, just a little-identified Israeli surveillance contractor. Cobwebs’s marquee product, the surveillance platform Tangles, iTagPro locator gives its users a bounty of different tools for tracking folks as they navigate each the web and the actual world, iTagPro bluetooth tracker synthesizing social media posts, affordable item tracker app activity, facial recognition, and phone tracking.

News of the purchase comes as Abbott’s border crackdown escalated to new heights, following a Department of Public Safety whistleblower’s report of extreme mistreatment of migrants by state law enforcement and a Justice Department lawsuit over the governor’s deployment of razor wire on the Rio Grande. The Cobwebs documents show that Abbott’s efforts to usurp the federal government’s constitutional authority to conduct immigration enforcement have extended into the electronic realm as well. The implications might reach far beyond the geographic bounds of the border and iTagPro portable into the personal lives of citizens and noncitizens alike. "Government businesses systematically shopping for data that has been originally collected to offer client companies or digital advertising represents the worst attainable kind of decontextualized misuse of non-public data," Wolfie Christl, a privacy researcher who tracks information brokerages, told The Intercept. We’re impartial of company pursuits - and iTagPro portable powered by members. Join Our Newsletter Thank you For Joining!

Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. Will you take the next step to help our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept? By signing up, iTagPro portable I comply with receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and iTagPro official Terms of Use. Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Like its competitors on the planet of software tracking tools, Cobwebs - which sells its providers to the Department of Homeland Security, iTagPro portable the IRS, and iTagPro portable quite a lot of undisclosed corporate customers - lets its shoppers observe the movements of non-public individuals and not using a court docket order. Instead of needing a judge’s sign-off, these monitoring companies depend on bulk-purchasing location pings pulled from smartphones, typically through unscrupulous mobile apps or in-app advertisers, an unregulated and more and more pervasive type of location tracking. In August 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism division purchased a year of Tangles access for $198,000, based on contract documents, iTagPro support obtained via a public records request by Tech Inquiry, a watchdog and analysis organization, and shared with The Intercept.

The state has renewed its Tangles subscription twice since then, though the invention that Cobwebs failed to pay taxes owed in Texas briefly derailed the renewal last April, in response to an email included in the data request. A second 2021 contract document shared with The Intercept reveals DPS purchased "unlimited" entry to Clearview AI, a controversial face recognition platform that matches people to tens of billions of photos scraped from the web. The catastrophe declaration, which spans more than 50 counties, iTagPro portable is a part of an ongoing campaign by Abbott that has pushed the bounds of civil liberties in Texas, mainly by the governor’s use of the Department of Public Safety. Under Operation Lone Star, Abbott has spent $4.5 billion surging 10,000 Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard personnel to the border as part of a said effort to beat back a migrant "invasion," which he claims is aided and abetted by President Joe Biden.

The resulting venture has been riddled with scandal, together with migrants languishing for months in state jails with out charges and several other suicides amongst personnel deployed on the mission. On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department sued Texas over Abbott’s deployment of floating barricades on the Rio Grande. Despite Abbott’s repeated claims that Operation Lone Star is a focused effort focused particularly on crimes on the border, a joint investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and the Marshall Project final year found that the state was counting arrests and drug costs far from the U.S-Mexico divide and unrelated to the Operation Lone Star mandate. Records obtained by the information organizations final summer time showed that the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Abbott’s operation. The status of the investigation has not been made public. Where the Department of Public Safety’s entry to Tangles’s highly effective cellphone monitoring software will fit into Abbott’s controversial border enforcement regime remains uncertain.