Forbes reports:

In 2021, Meta banned a surveillance company called Cobwebs from gathering intelligence across all its platforms. Its security staff had discovered Cobwebs, founded by former members of Israel’s elite cyber intel agencies, was using hundreds of accounts to snoop on Facebook and WhatsApp users, many of them activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico.

Since then, ICE has spent over $5 million on the company’s tools, with one $2 million purchase made this week for Cobwebs’ AI-powered social media surveillance tech Tangles. The software scours the open internet and the dark web for information relevant to police investigations with AI tying together data on people of interest. In one recent description filed with the Texas state government, PenLink, which now sells Cobwebs tech after a 2023 merger, wrote that Tangles “automatically ingests historical data from multiple communication channels, mobile forensics, internet-based communications, location data, financial records and web intelligence.”

Tangles creates a sort-of daily life profile of the people it surveils by mining social media for their posts, contacts, locations and events they attended, combining it with any information leaked about them online. It can also search a subject’s face across other data the tool has collected to see where else they’ve been spotted. Late last year, law enforcement in Virginia signed a contract to pay $35,000 a year for access to Tangles “AI face detection and AI face search,” per a government record.

Its tool WebLoc can search a given location to “monitor trends of mobile devices that have given data at those locations and how often they have been there,” per a government case study, useful for monitoring events like protests or large gatherings. It’s unclear from the the contract details just how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to use it, but it could be used to locate undocumented immigrants or investigate child sexual exploitation, as well as human and narcotics trafficking.

ICE spokesperson Mike Alvarez said, “Nothing new here. For years law enforcement across the nation has leveraged technological innovation to fight crime. ICE is no different.” He said ICE used the tech while “respecting civil liberties and privacy interests.”

PenLink hadn’t provided comment at the time of publication.

Cobwebs previously showed how Tangles could target the Black Lives Matter movement, according to a manual first reported by independent journalist Jack Poulson, providing a case study on how it could be used to monitor and map out X accounts related to the movement. [Continue reading…]