Texas State Police Gear Up for Massive Expansion of Surveillance Tech

The Texas Department of Public Safety signed a 5-year , nearly $5.3 million contract for a surveillance tool called Tangles from tech firm PenLink .

Tangles is an artificial intelligence-powered web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark web.

The privacy implications of police using services that provide location data are “identical” to the issues raised in the Carpenter case, ACLU lawyer says.

DPS purchased the software as part of Governor Greg Abbott ’s multi-billion dollar Operation Lone Star border crackdown.

ICE holds Cobwebs America 's highest-dollar federal contract so far, according to usa.gov.gov.

Other Texas clients include the Dallas and Houston police departments and the sheriff’s office in Jackson County , which shares access with the Matagorda County Sheriff's Office .

Other government agencies already have moved away from purchasing products that use massive amounts of cell phone location data.

The services can be expensive, the use of data is invasive, and there isn’t much evidence that these services have substantially helped investigations or solved a lot of cases, Wessler says.