Since Australia, is part of the Five Eyes global surveillance network, whatever online 'tools' the United States uses, Australia also has the ability to use them.
Also, keep in mind that Australia is a totalitarian régime.
MANY people believe that their data goes to just 'advertisers' but many of these shell corporations for governments to use.
People listen to clergy and faith leaders call for accountability at the
site where Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Jan.
8.
What acting ICE Director Todd Lyons called the “largest immigration
enforcement operation ever” continues to unfold in Minnesota. And we are
learning about the tools federal law enforcement agents use to track
the people they're trying to arrest, as well as protesters.
ICE
recently purchased two programs called Tangles and Webloc, which are
used to track the cell phone activity of entire neighborhoods and
monitor people over social media and through internet data, according to
reporting by 404 Media.
404 Media journalist Joseph Cox joined MPR News host Nina Moini with
insight on those tools and how they’re used to track people.
The following has been edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
Tangles is a social media monitoring
tool. We've seen that before, where companies will scrape sites like
Twitter or Bluesky and then make that information much more accessible
to the authorities.
What's different here is that Tangles is in
combination with the tool call Webloc, the other tool we'll speak about
in a minute. But it sort of gives an all-in-one solution for following
people online. When it comes to their social media activity, ICE
officials can add them to a watch list so they will be alerted whenever
this person posts.
They are able to use AI to build some sort of
sentiment analysis about what they're posting as well. The idea is that
whenever somebody posts something online that ICE is interested in, the
officials are going to see it.
How
does the program obtain the location data from the phones in the first
place? For example, what if you're a person who turns your location off?
If you turn your location off, that is actually probably a very, very
good thing to do if you are trying to get around this sort of
surveillance. It does not get the data from the telecoms. It doesn't get
it from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, that sort of thing. It actually
gets it, weirdly, through the online advertising ecosystem.
So
whenever that little advert loads in your app, in Candy Crush or
whatever, you'll see an advert there in the background. There's all of
this tech going on where different companies are trying to get that
advertisement in front of you.
There are also spy companies
essentially harvesting that data, including phone location data. They
then sell access to that to the government. It's basically a side
product of the advertising ecosystem we see every day. But of course,
somebody who is browsing the internet or just using an app has no idea
that this is happening in the background.
What about this other program that ICE is using, Webloc? How does it work?
Webloc
obtains information likely that same way — the location data — and it
allows a user, in this case ICE, to search a map-style interface for
phones and, by extension, people they might be interested in.
You
log into the interface, you draw a circle or rectangle around a place
of interest, maybe an ICE facility, maybe somewhere where a protest is
happening. It then shows all of the location data and phones it has for
that location, and the user is able to then track the phones to other
places. So maybe this phone went over here and it stayed here overnight.
Well, that's probably where the person slept. That is probably where
the person lives. You track the phone to another location during the day
after a protest. Well, maybe that's where this person works. So it
allows users of this program to figure out probably who these people are
and where else they're going after the fact.
And of course, that could be useful for ICE in many different contexts. The Wall Street Journal years ago, reported
ICE was already using this sort of location data to catch immigrants
and Customs and Border Protection was using it to monitor the
U.S.-Mexico border as well.
What do you know about how these tools are being used so far here in Minnesota?
That
is, unfortunately, the one thing we really don't know. And of course, I
would love to have more information on that. All we know is that this
tool was bought for millions of dollars. I obtained the information
about how it works, but we don't know what exactly they're using it for.
Now, what I would do again is point to that earlier Wall Street
Journal reporting where this has been used to catch people that ICE
wishes to catch, and it has been used by other parts of DHS to monitor
the border. The only thing I would add on there is that, at least in
marketing material, the company behind this technology has sort of
floated the idea of using it to monitor Black Lives Matter protests as
well. So First Amendment protected activity has come up explicitly in
the marketing material for this technology.
What
I would say is that from everything I've learned, from looking at
material from this company others and speaking to government officials
as well, these sorts of tools for ICE and other agencies are really good
for looking at movements of people or groups of people.
It can
actually be quite difficult for ICE to focus on a particular phone and,
by extension, the person. They almost have to be lucky that the target
is included in that particular data set. But if you see a big group of
phones moving to a certain location or away from it, that is probably
how this technology is best going to be used.
A U.S. government
official told me this data is definitely not as useful as the stuff you
would get from AT&T, but that would require a warrant, whereas this
data, crucially, they don't need a warrant to use it because they're
simply buying it from a government contractor.
What
can people concerned about being tracked do about this? Do they have
any legal protection? How can people better control whether they're
being tracked?
Yeah, you're right about the legal protection. Unfortunately, there
doesn't seem to be much around this sort of data at all. On a more
technical level, it is simply being more aware of the things you're
installing on your phone. Maybe you downloaded a flashlight app and it's
requesting location data. Well, does it really need that permission
that's requested on my phone? Maybe you can deny that, maybe you can
delete that app.
And of course, getting some sort of ad blocker
potentially could help. But as I said earlier, I think turning off
location services is probably the more solid and robust way to combat
this, if you wish to do so.
But no, there isn't really a legal
protection. It's more a technical protection that you have to do
yourself as an individual phone user.
Source:mprnews.org
