"Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods" 8 January 2026

404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work.

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...

...In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Carpenter v. United States case that authorities need a warrant to access historical cellphone location data sourced from telecoms. The ICE legal analysis suggests that the agency does not think the same protection extends to commercially available smartphone location data...

“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media...

...Webloc users can search its databases of mobile phone data in various ways. Users can perform a single perimeter analysis to search a specific area for mobile phones across a certain time period...Once a Webloc user has identified a device of interest, they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner, by seeing where else it has travelled both locally and across the country...The material suggests that if users look at where the device was located at night, they might find the person’s possible home, and during the day, the person’s possible employer...

...404 Media also obtained material related to Tangles, the social media monitoring product ICE bought access to. That shows users can detect faces in an image and then attempt to identify them; perform sentiment analysis on a target’s posts; and add specific social media accounts to a “watch list.” Independent journalist Jack Poulson previously reported on Tangles material showing how the tool could be used to monitor protesters, including the Black Lives Matter movement...

...A Penlink spokesperson told 404 Media in an email, “The tools we provide to the government exclusively use publicly or commercially available data and are used to advance criminal investigations and save lives. They enable law enforcement to spot threats faster and use evidence more efficiently.” It added, “Penlink operates under strict compliance, due diligence, and responsible-use standards. PenLink is committed to transparency, legality, and integrity in every aspect of our work.”..