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 their face across the web to see where else they’ve been spotted. Its tool WebLock 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. According to ICE’s latest $2 million contact details, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to use it to locate undocumented immigrants and investigate child sexual exploitation, as well as human and narcotics trafficking.
Neither ICE nor PenLink had provided comment at the time of publication.
“Tools like PenLink can absolutely assist ICE in turning law-abiding citizens and protestors into targets of the federal government.”
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. According to a 2024 sales brochure it was also used to identify January 6 rioters. “Utilizing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Natural Language Processing to automatically collect, analyze, and visualize data from social media and other online sources, Tangles identified people of interest, suspicious activities, and provided real-time alerts,” it reads. “This technology enabled law enforcement to predict potential violence, manage situational awareness during the event, and gather evidence for post-event,” per the brochure.
Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Forbes that amassing and combining vast amounts of information in the way Tangles does can infringe on citizens’ rights. “This extension and expansion of ICE’s PenLink contract underlines the federal government’s enthusiasm for indiscriminate and warrantless data collection on as many people as possible,” she said. “We’re still learning about the extent of the government’s growing surveillance apparatus, but tools like PenLink can absolutely assist ICE in turning law-abiding citizens and protestors into targets of the federal government.”
Lipton said the Tangles tool was also problematic because it ingests data stolen by hackers and leaked on the web and darknet. That would likely include bank details, health records and passwords for online accounts.
ICE’s Tangles contract is one of many AI surveillance purchases it’s made in the last month as it ramps up staffing for the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans. The acquisitions include drones from Skydio and a robot from Canadian company Icor Technology that can climb stairs and open doors.
It also bought a direct rival to Tangles called Fivecast Onyx, which claims to use AI to turbocharge open source intelligence. That’s part of a $4.1 million contract signed in 2023 under the Biden administration.