Surveillance Tooling Newly Acquired By ICE Can Track Entire Neighborhoods Without A Warrant
Posted on January 12, 2026
A new report by 404 Media outlines the expansive surveillance capabilities of software tools acquired rapidly by ICE. The piece expands on earlier work chronicling ICE’s surveillance equipment shopping spree over the last year (which CCDBR also shared in October) by supplementing it with an ICE “legal analysis” document. Crucially, the reporting warns that, with the products of one company alone, ICE is able to track the whereabouts of thousands of people across wide geographical areas using smartphone location data.
Specifically, ICE enjoys this capacity based on two Penlink products: “Webloc” and “Tangles”. Webloc boasts the most invasive features of the two, as it empowers the agency to track cellular devices by geographical area and time. With an interface similar to a navigation app, analysts need only draw a perimeter on a region of a map and specify a time window, and the program queries the Penlink database for all cellular devices that traversed that area in that period of time. Users can then follow up on any of the devices identified to see a historical log of all the places that device has been, even outside the initial search region.
The software is particularly apt for depicting the patterns of life of targeted devices. Once a device has been selected, the results page outputs summary statistics such as its operating system, the average amount of time the device was present at a location, and the number of location data points Penlink has for the device. Taken together with a tally of the device’s pinpointed locations and timestamps, it is easy to derive the device owner’s pattern of life: where they live, where they work, and who they socialize with.
The document does not specify how Penlink obtains cellular location data, but the article’s author, the veteran privacy reporter Joseph Cox, speculates that the company purchases it from data brokers. Penlink’s own statement on its business practices does not contradict this conjecture, as the company maintains that all the data supplied to users is either available on the public Internet, or purchased from data brokers. This is not hard to imagine, as these vendors are not known for being choosy about their clientele.
The 404 Media piece does an excellent job of examining the legal distinctions by which ICE justifies its use of tools like Webloc. Another ICE internal document obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request elucidates the federal government’s own differentiation between telecom location metadata and commercial location data. While the document does defer to Carpenter v. United States, which established that the exceptionally sensitive nature of cellular location metadata entitles it to Fourth Amendment protections, commercial location data—the kind of location data obtained and transmitted by mobile applications—is deemed less sensitive. The latter, the document argues, stems from the mobile device user’s voluntary installation of the application, and choice to enable location permissions for it, and is thus a “business record” of the sort that the government is allowed to obtain under Smith v. Maryland’s “third-party doctrine”.
The other of ICE’s new Penlink toys, Tangles, is primarily a social media monitoring tool. As social media is, by its nature, public, its intrusiveness is notably less than that of Webloc. However, its facial recognition capability, when used in conjunction with other data collection initiatives, can facilitate extraordinarily invasive mass surveillance. ICE agents could take videos or still images of protests—or really any scene on an American street—and feed it to Tangles, and the program could identify all the faces captured. It would be trivial for this to be done in real time, as ICE officers and their vehicles are equipped with cameras that are capable of relaying live images to an analyst, who could then put them in Tangles’s crosshairs.
The nature of the products ICE has purchased from Penlink in just a year demonstrate how quickly a government agency can achieve mass surveillance power practically overnight. Savvy civil liberties defenders would be wise to routinely query every law enforcement agency, and keep close scrutiny on its ratified contracts, to track the expansion of spying powers over time. Failing to keep pace with the government would make regulating its behavior nearly impossible.
You can read the full article from 404 Media here.
