ICE, immigration police in the United States, has taken a new step to meet Donald Trump’s requirements in the fight against illegal migrants. In the documents revealed by 404, it seems that the federal body now has access to “hundreds of millions” of data related to the geolocation of smartphones using the American mobile network.
To do this, the American agency has offered a very powerful surveillance tool that allows to collect thousands of millions of data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones every day. A “everything in one” tool that can verify the telecommunications network, as well as social networks.
A surprising revelation when the ICE had announced that it had finished this practice under the Biden era, which does not require any mandate or order of the court.
“Normal” applications recover mass data
It is Penlink who is at the origin of this tool. This company, which has made massive monitoring of its specialty, is proud to be able to offer a compiled owner platform, which deals and validated billions of daily location signals. It can also carry out forensic and predictive analyzes.
According to Forbes, $ 5 million were spent to have this tool, accessible thanks to two products sold by Penlink, Tangles and Webloc.
According to the document revealed by 404 Media, ICE justifies this purchase for the “important operational challenges” faced by immigration agents. Without this tool, it would be impossible to predict certain behaviors of migrants who supposedly arrived illegally on American soil.
However, ICE has rejected the offer of another company, Babel Street, which markets a tool to track a user. But as several media had pointed out, it also allowed to reveal if a person left sensitive places (abortion clinics, places of worship …).
A potentially illegal process
Penlink managed to agglomerate these elements thanks to the purchase (then resale) of precise location data, allowed by many conventional applications that claim that a user shares the place where he uses them. Advertising is also an entry point, with the difference that it is more insidious since it is transparent for the user.
The internal security department did not want to confirm the purchase of said tool, since in the survey he published a means to “demonize” the people of the ice.
The latter are regularly under the fire of criticism due to their muscle methods to stop migrants in the United States, carried by a Donald Trump that made it one of its main campaign arguments. In all the United States, even in the cities of “sanctuaries” (or local authorities do not collaborate with the ice), the immigration police carry out mass residents, especially before warehouses or factories, where people who do not necessarily have American nationality.
However, the purchase of this tool defies because it could be illegal. When the Wall Street Journal had revealed a similar case in 2022, a 2023 report by the Inspector General of the Department of Internal Security confirmed that the various agencies had violated the law due to the lack of assurance of this data. The report could not have established that these data had been properly used.
Source: BFM TV
