Holy shit. Reported by Wonkette...
Marcie Jones / Wonkette: "It should also be noted, 404 Media reports that DHS has purchased two new apps, called Tangles and Webloc, that let them see the recent location data of any phone in a given area and cross-references it with commercial data sets. Now if they want to see, say, whose phone in any city was at a protest earlier that day, DHS can, with no warrant. Just a touch of a button, and they can access detailed data from ordinary cellphone apps, like Facebook or the weather, and compile that data for an extremely detailed record of almost any phone users’ activity."
...and from the 404 Media site:"A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media. Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for."
I've been numb to these assholes for so long that, I am just beyond words to piece together how I feel or how to react. There has to be some countermeasure? From reading the 404 Media outline, they are basing the surveillance on location-specific data. I wonder if turning off location and GPS services would curtail this data from being divulged? Encrypt the phone of itself?
Been a long week... going to set this aside and do more research.
Rade
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4 comments:
Best thing you can do is turn it off if you are going to a protest. Use burner phones at protests.
I'm sure some workaround will be found to counteract it. If not, then litigation on the basis of privacy law. Quite apart from the DHS, an app like this could be used by abusers to locate their spouses/partners who have escaped them. That cannot stand, either.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think a phone can be tracked at all if it is turned off. If you only turn it on when you're actually using it, you should be OK.
Well in that case they will love reading my text about what I think of them then, when I text friends. I have been kicked off Instagram and reinstated many more times that I can count, from sending my "thoughts" to the like of Ice Barbie, MTG, Jenine Piro, and many others to mention. I'm surprised I haven't been banned permanently yet.
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