Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - You Are Probably Being Tracked By ICE Right Now

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  ICE is preparing to deploy a sweeping new surveillance system that would allow it to monitor the real-time movements and online activity of millions of people. Internal documents. The two key tools, Tangles and WebLoc, were originally designed by the Israeli intelligence firm Cobwebs.  Together, they enable ICE analysts to fuse billions of mobile location points with data scraped from platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Reddit to build detailed digital dossiers on anyone. This expansion of ICE’s data surveillance efforts comes amid broader federal initiatives to monitor social media and suppress dissent. Reports indicate ICE will contract private analysts to continuously scan major platforms for “anti-American” or “anti-Christian” speech under the Trump administration’s new NSPM-7 directive. This is yet another dangerous escalation of mass surveillance and political targeting, undermining First and Fourth Amendment protections. If you like this video, please support me on Patreon!! https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz   https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0  https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Soon, ICE will know exactly where you are at all times. The agency is in the process of buying a tool that will let agents see hundreds of millions of people's phone location data. This is a big reversal from a previous decision that the agency made to allegedly not use location data harvested remotely from people's phones. Welcome back to Free Speech Friday, my series covering the fight for free speech, civil liberties, and the right to free expression online. 404 media got a hold of a proposed ICE contract that shows the agency is seeking an all-in-one tool for searching and synthesizing massive amounts of location data and information taken from social media. The contractor that ICE is reportedly in dealings with is called Penlink. Penlink started off as a provider of digital forensics and open-source intelligence software made for law enforcement and the government. But over time, their products have expanded and they've become a major player in the all-in-one investigative platform.

market. On its website, Penlink now frames itself as a global leader in AI-powered digital intelligence, offering modules for data analytics, open web investigations, live communications communications interception, and more. Just two years ago, Penlink absorbed the Israeli OSCE form Cobwebs, incorporating Cobwebs' intelligence and data aggregation tools into its product line. This merger allowed Penlink to bundle the Israeli firm Cobbs' Web's intelligence tools with its own device and data analysis systems. So the two Two products that ICE is looking to use right now by Penlink are known as tangles and weblock. Both were initially created by that Israeli intelligence company Cobwebs and both are powerful

surveillance tools. Tangles and Weblock basically combined location tracking on a mass scale and social media monitoring into the single interface. According to ICE's internal documents, the agency specifically chose Penlink's products because they offer this all-in-one capability, essentially combining, again, millions of data points on location with information scraped publicly from social media, places like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, etc. ICE is seeking to pay about $5 million for these capabilities,

and they even say that they chose Penlink over other government contract competitors that they have actually longer histories working with because of Penlink's ability to harvest and synthesize this massive amount of data. ICE justified the millions of dollars that they're spending on Penlink's tools by claiming that they essentially eliminate need for analysts to manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources. So before these ICE agents would have to spend a lot of time taking all of this fragmented like location data or social media posts across all these platforms

and kind of like synthesize it together and match things up. But now thanks to tangles and web lock, again, created by this Israeli intelligence firm, they can create essentially a mass automated digital drag net that links anyone's physical movements to their social media connections and online speech. Weblock specifically tracks the geolocation history of mobile devices, monitoring where people go, how often, and when. While TANGs builds these intricate personal profiles of people based on their social media activity, combining things like posts, photos, event attendance, videos, they even use facial recognition to create this comprehensive digital dossier on the people that

they're tracking. With these tools, ICE analysts can search for individual people or groups instantly and visualize their networks on this massive scale. And these are personal networks, professional networks, ideological networks. These tools suck everyone affiliated with their targets up. And of course, news of this Penlink contract broke right as Wired reported that ICE plans to hire dozens and dozens more contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms to target people specifically for deportation. As Wired reported, federal contracting records show that ICE is seeking private vendors

to run a multi-year social media surveillance program. The surveillance program envisions stationing nearly 30 private ICE analysts at facilities in Vermont and Southern California. These analysts will scour Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and basically all places that people post online for speech, speech that essentially they feel like they can deport people over.

They can take lawful legal speech and convert it into fresh leads for enforcement raids. Draft planning documents of this scheme show that it's massive. ICE wants a contractor capable of, staffing these centers around the clock and constantly processing case files on tight deadlines. Agents involved in the social media monitoring will be crawling through public posts and looking for people criticizing the government or saying negative things about people in power or probably

expressing any sort of leftist sentiment. And maybe you're like, okay, well, I'm not an illegal immigrant and I don't really say stuff that's that controversial online. Like, I'm not personally promoting violence and extremism. Well, the Trump administration literally just last month, signed this new national security directive identifying a lot of things that you probably wouldn't consider as violent rhetoric as violent rhetoric. The directive, which is called NSPM 7, designates that anyone expressing the following views online is fomenting political violence. So I just want to read you a few topics from this list that the Trump administration considers violent extremism. Anti-American speech. What that is, they don't define. Anti-capitalist speech, so you can't criticize capitalism anymore.

Anti-Christian speech. You can't criticize the religion of Christianity. Support for the overthrow of the U.S. government. Extremism on migration. Extremism on race. Extremism on gender, meaning, I don't know, you acknowledge the existence of trans people. Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family

or hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion or morality. This means that anything you say online that could be construed as anti-capitalist or anti-capitalist or anti-American could be deemed as a violent political rhetoric. NSPM 7 also designates a slew of other belief systems as extreme and basically ensures that anyone questioning power will be put on a government watch list.

But back to ICE. Earlier this year, the intercept revealed that ICE was pursuing plans for a system that could automatically scan social media for negative sentiment towards the government and flag users that expressed a quote, proclivity for violence, aka, again, criticizing things like capitalism or advocating for LGBTQ rights. These records were then used to build dossiers

on flagged individuals, compiling personal details, family links, and using facial recognition to connect images and videos of people from across the web. ICE's main investigative database was, of course, built by Palantir and uses algorithmic analysis to filter huge amounts of data to generate these leads. But this new contract that was reviewed by Wired would funnel even more social media data and input

directly into that system. It's so crucial to recognize that this mass expansion of ISIS surveillance machine is a broad attack on our democratic freedoms. A society where the government can track and does track every single phone, every single post, every single social connection, and locate anyone they want basically 24-7 using location data is not one where dissent and free expression are flourishing. The use of tools like tangles and weblock represent this gradual militarization of our own data. Information about regular people's private lives is now being used as raw material for government crackdowns on free speech and free expression. We are supposed to have the right to speak, organize, and protest without fear.

But ISIS surveillance machine represents a direct threat to these civil liberties. And maybe you're like, wait a minute, Taylor, isn't the Fourth Amendment supposed to protect us against unreasonable searches? And wasn't it designed specifically to prevent this type of mass suspicionless surveillance? Well, unfortunately, because of loopholes created by commercial data brokers and other legally gray data harvesting practices, ICE claims that none of this is technically violating the law. These aggressive crackdowns on speech are already being used to censor speech about ICE itself. On Wednesday, it was revealed that Apple banned an app whose sole purpose was to archive videos of ICE abuses and wrongdoing. That's literally all the app did. It was just a record with videos documenting abusive and illegal behavior by ICE.

The app was called Eyes Up, and its whole purpose was to, quote, preserve evidence until it could be used in court. The shutdown of Eyes Up happened as part of this broader crackdown from Apple, Google, and other tech companies on ICE spotting apps after pressure from the Department of Justice. The administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 media, quote, our goal is government accountability. We aren't even doing real-time tracking of ICE agents. I think the Trump administration is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have. He added, quote, I personally look at each submission to ensure that it's relevant, accurately described to the best that I can, and appropriate to post. I actually look at the user's submitted location and usually cross-reference it with Google Street View to verify. We have an entire private app just for moderation of the submissions.

And as 404 media reported, the videos available on Eyes Up are basically the same thing that you would see scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X. They're a mix of professional media reports and just user-generated clips of ICE agents acting really badly. Many of these videos are just re-uploads of material taken from social media. They show things like footage of ICE officials aggressively detaining people inside New York City courts, something that ICE has been doing for months. Another video is from the New York Immigration Coalition, which, represents more than 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups. Yet another uploaded to the app was an Instagram video showing ICE taking, quote, a mother as her child begs the officer not to take her.

The map where these things are happening shows similar videos from San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and more. And of course, all of the people on the right and center who defended accounts like libs of TikTok for years, claiming that these accounts are just documenting public social media posts. They exist just to like repost other content. By the way, that was never true. But here's an app that actually does do just that.

But because it criticizes ICE and because it shows the government in a poor light, companies are shutting it down. I think this shows as well how Apple, Google, and none of these tech giants care about protecting free speech. As I've covered so much on this channel, they will happily cout out to power and comply with really anything that the Trump administration or any administration wants if it means doing business. And as we're talking about ICE and just this broad erosion of civil liberties, I want people to

understand that this applies to you. You should care about this even if you're undocumented, even if you're not doing direct work with undocumented people. Because of course, I think by now you understand that like the worst type of invasive surveillance systems are deployed on undocumented people or immigrants. But then they start to deploy them against people of color, against activists, against journalists. And the list goes on and on. We've seen the Trump administration target legal U.S. residents for deportation. And while all of this is happening, of course, aside from Ron Widen, the one member of Congress who actually cares about tech policy and actually cares about protecting user data, Congress is focused on stupid things like trying to force

the passage of things like the Kids Online Safety Act, which would just mandate that these tech companies collect even more data. I'm going to continue to cover Penlink and the way that these tools are used against US citizens and non-citizens alike. But to do that, I need your support. Right now, I have no more brand deals. As you can probably imagine, covering these topics is not exactly lucrative and I'm certainly not considered brand safe. So all of my income right now is 100% reliant on you. If you feel like

my reporting is important, please subscribe to my Patreon below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, UserMag at UserMag.co. That's usermag.com. On my Patreon, I do monthly live streams. I have a biweekly newsletter. I do bonus episodes of Power User and more. Every dollar helps so much and I can't thank you enough for your support. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.