{"id":154964,"date":"2026-02-07T10:32:30","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T10:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/154964\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T10:32:30","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T10:32:30","slug":"texas-police-invested-millions-in-a-shadowy-phone-tracking-software-they-wont-say-how-theyve-used-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/154964\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas Police Invested Millions in a Shadowy Phone-Tracking Software. They Won\u2019t Say How They\u2019ve Used It."},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: This story is the third installment in a series<\/a> produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center\u2019s AI Accountability Network.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Goliad County police kicked off one human smuggling investigation not with a suspect\u2019s name, but with a discarded receipt and cell phone surveillance software. In June 2021, Chief Deputy Tim Futch chased a speeding F-150 headed toward Houston on U.S. Highway 59; he believed the vehicle was carrying undocumented immigrants, concealed in the truck bed beneath plywood, according to a police report. Trying to evade the cops, the driver pulled into a ditch, and around 10 people bailed out and took off sprinting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the aftermath, Roy Boyd, the sheriff in this county of 7,000 situated halfway between Laredo and Houston, surveyed the scene. The driver proved hard to identify via the pickup\u2019s plate. But, on the ground, he spotted a fresh receipt from a liquor store in Pasadena, a Houston suburb, he recalled in a June 2024 interview with the Texas Observer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The stub of paper was enough, Boyd said, to justify deploying an expensive\u2014and controversial\u2014artificial intelligence-powered surveillance tool called Tangles. A specially-trained analyst used the receipt, Boyd said, to conduct warrantless surveillance on the suspected driver\u2014and on other smart phone users\u2014by utilizing a Tangles add-on feature called Webloc, which tracks mobile devices\u2019 movements in a client-selected virtual area through a capability called \u201cgeofencing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

After the bailout incident, Boyd acquired a license for the tool with about $300,000 in state border security grants\u2014though the sheriff admits that he\u2019s not a tech guy: In 2024, he still used a hand-me-down iPhone 10, which hit the market in 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A tall, slim, seventh-generation Texan, Boyd fits the archetype of a small-town Southern sheriff with his firm handshake and light drawl. He usually wears his sand-colored cowboy hat, leather belt, and a matching holster manufactured by prisoners in a neighboring county. The latter encases a silver Colt pistol engraved with \u201cRemember Goliad,\u201d referencing the Mexican army\u2019s massacre of Anglo combatants who lost a battle in which Boyd says his ancestors died.<\/p>\n

Boyd worked as a career cop in the neighboring South Texas city of Victoria before being elected sheriff of Goliad County in 2020. He\u2019s since hobnobbed with President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and met repeatedly with border czar Tom Homan, and he leads a multijurisdictional task force named after Operation Lone Star<\/a>, Governor Greg Abbott\u2019s multi-billion dollar border militarization mission. The task force pools deputies and resources from nearly 60 Texas agencies mainly for anti-smuggling operations. It began with mostly rural departments, but it expanded to include more populous counties, the Texas National Guard, the U.S. Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Coast Guard. Task force members have spent at least $300,000 on Tangles, and according to emails obtained from Goliad County, many have been granted access to the software, which can track mobile device movements via third-party commercial data.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Roy Boyd (Goliad County)<\/p>\n

Tangles scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark webs and is the premier product of Cobwebs Technologies, a cybersecurity company founded in 2014 by three former members of special units in the Israeli military. In 2023, the Nebraska-based tech firm PenLink Ltd acquired the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The software has been met with criticism from civil liberties advocates, especially given that its WebLoc add-on enables warrantless device tracking. Normally, when U.S. police officers seek cell phone records or location data, they must obtain a warrant by presenting probable cause of a crime to a judge. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that warrants are required for obtaining location data from cell phone providers. But the rise of the multi-billion dollar data broker industry<\/a> has created a free-for-all that enables police and others to purchase massive amounts of cell phone location data without judicial review.<\/p>\n

Nathan Wessler, an ACLU attorney who argued the Carpenter case, said data broker-built services like Tangles pose the same privacy issues as those decided in the Supreme Court case and that law enforcement\u2019s ability to buy location data constitutes an erosion of constitutionally protected rights. \u201cPolice are doing an end run around this well-articulated system of judicial oversight by just paying money instead of going to a judge,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s just no checks of police abuse against that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the Goliad County case, a police analyst drew a virtual fence to examine an area that spanned about 300 miles between the Pasadena liquor store and the U.S.-Mexico border based on the day and time stamped on the receipt. He discovered that six phones used within a mile of the store had been tracked again later at a Texas immigration checkpoint, Boyd said. He didn\u2019t specify which checkpoint<\/a>; the U.S. Border Patrol has over a dozen of them in Texas, some permanent and some temporary.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Boyd rattles off statistics about the success of his task force in tracking gangs, but he provided only the one example involving Tangles and never said whether the information they obtained by geofencing helped lead to any arrest. In response to records requests, the department said it had no reports that mentioned Tangles, despite the fact that Goliad has had the software for more than three years. The corresponding incident report for the case Boyd cited doesn\u2019t mention Tangles, though he said an analyst used the software. It does state that the department collaborated with a Homeland Security Investigations analyst.<\/p>\n

Generally, Boyd said his office uses the software to find \u201cavenues for obtaining probable cause\u201d or \u201cto verify reasonable suspicion that you already have\u201d\u2014not as a basis by itself to make arrests.<\/p>\n

Beyond Goliad, Tangles has more powerful, deep-pocketed users. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), for example, has invested heavily in the software. DPS spent nearly $200,000 on Tangles in 2021 as an emergency purchase related to Operation Lone Star, and the agency has repeatedly expanded its contract. In 2024, DPS inked a 5-year, $5.3-million contract<\/a> for 230 named users. ICE\u2019s Office of Intelligence signed a contract worth around $2 million to use the software<\/a> in 2025, and the DEA in that same timeframe committed more than $10 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Boyd and Caleb Breshears, a Goliad County deputy and the task force commander, argued in interviews that Tangles presents no privacy concerns since its location tracking software doesn\u2019t reveal names, only device identification numbers in the online advertising ecosystem. Tangles users cannot search by name or by phone number; its location data is sourced from applications in which consumers consented to sharing their whereabouts, Breshears said.<\/p>\n

Nor does Tangles reveal what vehicle is associated with a device, but combined with Texas\u2019 broader arsenal of surveillance tools<\/a>, which includes a fleet of drones<\/a> and a network of automated license plate readers, \u201cThose are things that we might be able to piece together,\u201d Boyd said.<\/p>\n

PenLink Ltd, Tangles\u2019 present owner, touts its worldwide successes in combating human trafficking, drug smuggling, and money laundering, but the company declined to provide specific examples to the Observer of how the platform has assisted in U.S. cases. \u201cPenlink is proud to provide law enforcement with solutions that keep communities safe, protect people, rescue victims and solve crimes,\u201d company spokesperson Kristine German said in a written statement. \u201cOur technology enables law enforcement to spot threats faster and use evidence more efficiently to advance criminal investigations. The solutions we provide to the government exclusively use commercially available data. We follow industry best practices and comply with all relevant privacy laws, platform policies, and ethical standards.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In El Salvador, where authoritarian president Nayib Bukele has suspended civil liberties, the national police force purchased Tangles in 2020, according to the investigative outlet El Faro<\/a>. Just 13 months later, the state\u2019s Bukele-controlled legislative assembly approved criminal code reforms that allowed the judicial use of information obtained via warrantless surveillance by tools like Tangles, clearing the way for the dictator\u2019s state police to legally spy on citizens, El Faro reported. When asked about a repressive regime using its products, PenLink said the company does \u201cnot discuss specific customers or contracts.\u201d<\/p>\n

PenLink pitches Tangles as an \u201copen source intelligence\u201d software that compiles publicly available information. Yet even Meta, the social media giant that owns Facebook and Instagram and has been denounced for stockpiling too much of its own users data, has accused Cobwebs Technologies, the company that invented Tangles, of operating as a \u201csurveillance-for-hire<\/a>\u201d outfit; Meta banned Cobwebs Technologies from its platforms in 2021.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a separate emailed statement, PenLink distanced itself from the Meta ban: \u201cPenlink acquired Cobwebs in 2023, after those issues had been addressed and we are not aware of any issues since.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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But critics find U.S. law enforcement\u2019s growing domestic use of an array of surveillance tools presents major risks to civil liberties by enabling police to build a robust profile of almost anyone\u2019s life and movements without a warrant or probable cause. They find phone-tracking tools like Tangles to be particularly troubling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this veneer of respect for privacy that is painted over all of this data aggregation and consolidation,\u201d said Beryl Lipton, a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a California-based nonprofit focused on digital privacy-related civil liberties. Watchdog organizations like the EFF and ACLU have been forced to go to court to discover more information about its use: Last January, PenLink sued a California sheriff\u2019s office in an attempt to prevent the department from releasing public records to EFF that contained details about the company\u2019s products and prices, arguing they were \u201ctrade secret-protected information.\u201d EFF intervened in the case and ultimately prevailed. The sheriff\u2019s office handed over the records.<\/p>\n

So far, federal and Texas agencies combined have committed to spending at least $8 million dollars specifically for Tangles, according to a year-long Observer investigation. Yet, agencies refuse to say how Tangles has benefitted Texas criminal or immigration probes. Boyd said he couldn\u2019t think of a time that phone-tracking data has been directly linked to any arrest or prosecution in Goliad County, despite his agency\u2019s task force role. \u201cMost of that is probably going to be on the federal side and not so much on the state side,\u201d Boyd said. \u201cI can\u2019t think of any time when [Tangles] has been used for the prosecution of somebody. \u2026 It has not been a key component in our cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

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DPS declined comment on its use of the costly technology. In response to a records request, the agency told the Observer it has no incident reports and only seven confidential internal investigative reports from 2023 and 2024 that mention \u201cCobwebs\u201d (a shorthand sometimes used to refer to the the software named after the company that created it) or \u201cTangles,\u201d but it withheld them claiming that releasing the documents could \u201cprovide wrong-doers, drug traffickers, terrorists, and other criminals with information concerning how Department operations are planned, implemented and staffed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the last three years, many DPS investigators, police departments including those of major cities such as Dallas and Houston, and nearly 20 Texas sheriff\u2019s offices have obtained a Tangles log-in. The larger agencies have been evasive about how and when they use the tool, declining to provide examples to the Observer.<\/p>\n

No agencies contacted for this story provided examples of Tangles\u2019 use in any specific criminal cases. Dallas Police Department spokesperson Corbin Rubinson said only that \u201cTangles has been in use by the Department for several years and is used consistently in criminal investigations. The WebLoc add-on is used less frequently and produces fewer investigative leads.\u201d A Houston police spokesman said Tangles is used for \u201ccrime analysis, for supporting criminal Investigations, and for supporting situational awareness\/threat assessments\u201d and that the department does not use the WebLoc add-on that enables warrantless device tracking. Other agencies that purchased it, including the Killeen Police Department and the Montgomery County Sheriff\u2019s Office, did not respond.<\/p>\n

Texas agencies\u2019 failure to produce reports on arrests or other results linked to the controversial technology has two possible interpretations, experts say. \u201cEither this is just a massive waste of taxpayer money, right? They\u2019re spending all this money on the tool that they\u2019re not actually using,\u201d said Wessler, the ACLU attorney, \u201cor they\u2019re using it and hiding it from judges, criminal defense attorneys, criminal defendants and the press, which is a big story in itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

In April, state Senator Sarah Eckhardt, an Austin Democrat, raised questions during a border security committee hearing about DPS\u2019 investment of $20 million in multi-year contracts for various AI-powered social media monitoring tools like Tangles, following an earlier Observer report on the state police agency\u2019s spending on surveillance tech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In response, DPS Director Freeman Martin told Eckhardt and other committee members that such software has been critical in preventing mass shootings and said DPS had identified a potential school shooter using the technology.<\/p>\n

But when the Observer approached Martin a few days later at a border sheriffs\u2019 conference, he added only a few general observations, saying that the software has helped police save lives and make arrests.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I talk about technology now, and we\u2019re asking for funding, some people like it, some people hate it,\u201d he said, clarifying that Tangles in particular was controversial after the Observer asked about the software. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to lose those tools,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want all the tools. When somebody\u2019s threatening to shoot up the school, we got to find them. We can\u2019t wait till school starts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martin initially promised to speak more about the agency\u2019s successes with Tangles after the legislative session, which ended in June. But he never responded to requests for a follow-up interview made through his secretary and the agency\u2019s communications office, nor did he answer a list of questions sent by the Observer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wessler, the ACLU attorney, is skeptical that Tangles has been used to prevent mass casualty events. He said in emergencies police can obtain warrants and send rapid requests to cell phone service providers, who generally can supply more up-to-date and accurate location data than third-party tools. \u201cThe claim that this has helped prevent mass shootings is really interesting, and sounds pretty far-fetched to me.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Breshears, the Goliad County task force leader, explained that the software\u2019s underlying location data are typically days old. That means it does not allow for real-time tracking and is only useful when multiple factors align. \u201cWhen you say \u2018track\u2019, technically it\u2019s correct, but \u2026 I\u2019m not tracking you live. I can only see where you have been,\u201d Breshears said. \u201cIt\u2019s all historical information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Texas law does not explicitly require police to document use of AI-powered surveillance tech, so police reports may not be a reliable indicator of whether Tangles has been used even in investigations that led to arrests. In the 2025 legislative session, Southlake Republican Giovanni Capriglione introduced a bill<\/a> that would have mandated government agencies using AI to disclose use of these systems to \u201cconsumers.\u201d It is unclear how that might have applied to police reports, which under the public information act already can be heavily redacted under certain circumstances, especially if an investigation is ongoing. Legislators ultimately passed an overhauled version of the bill that does not explicitly require police to document or disclose use of AI.<\/p>\n

\"\"Capriglione on the House floor in May 2025 (Jordan Vonderhaar for the Texas Observer)<\/p>\n

Under due process rules and Texas\u2019 Michael Morton Act, prosecutors must share relevant investigative reports, videos, and other related information to anyone charged with a crime. But the Observer reached out to all 80 federal public defender offices, emailed Texas defense attorneys and Dallas\u2019 district attorney, and interviewed a longtime Houston public defender and a former Goliad-area prosecutor, yet no one provided information about Tangles being mentioned in records disclosed to them while representing a client or charging a defendant in criminal court.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amrutha Jindal, executive director of Lone Star Defenders, which provides public defenders for migrants prosecuted under Operation Lone Star, said she had never come across any evidence the software had been used in any of the nonprofit\u2019s cases. \u201cAlarms are ringing in my head,\u201d Jindal said in a phone interview. \u201cThere\u2019s also a question of\u2014are we even being told?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Observer found many examples in police records of how Texas state troopers have surveilled the homes of immigrants<\/a> or made pre-textual traffic stops<\/a> to help ICE target and detain people who were not charged with a crime. However, it is unclear whether state police used Tangles or other surveillance tools. The Observer reached out to a network of more than 60 immigration attorneys in Texas and beyond, and none offered examples of how this software may have been used against their clients.<\/p>\n

In Washington D.C., the district\u2019s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA) has purchased Tangles for several years, though it has not said how it deploys the tool; in August, the ACLU of DC filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records.<\/p>\n

One of the executives at PenLink, the parent company that sells Tangles, is Derek Maltz, a former DEA agent who participated in Border 911, a political nonprofit, with others who are now homeland security leaders in the Trump administration<\/a>. He served as PenLink\u2019s executive director of government relations from 2014 to 2025. Throughout that time, the DEA doled out more than $100 million in contracts with PenLink for its various products, according to public federal spending data<\/a>. Maltz left the company to serve as the DEA\u2019s acting director for five months<\/a> after Trump\u2019s second inauguration. Last summer, Maltz pivoted back to PenLink, where he became senior vice president of global business growth and strategy. Since Maltz re-joined PenLink last July, the company has garnered about $3.4 million more in federal contracts.<\/p>\n

In a written statement, a PenLink spokesperson said: \u201cDerek Maltz is a veteran national security and law enforcement leader who brings 28 years of federal law enforcement experience to his role at Penlink. His appointment as Acting Administrator speaks to his expertise in this field, and we are pleased to welcome him back to Penlink. We are compliant with Federal Post-Employment Restrictions.\u201d Maltz did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Paromita Shah, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, a legal advocacy group focused on the intersection of immigration and surveillance issues, said Maltz\u2019s case illustrates a well-established revolving door between tech companies and the federal government. \u201cAs much as these guys complain about the swamp, they certainly benefit from it,\u201d Shah said.<\/p>\n

Local agencies from New York to California have also bought Tangles. In Arizona, the Pinal County Sheriff\u2019s Office\u2014a populous county about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson\u2014paid more than $90,000 in 2022 and 2023 to use the platform. In an email, Pinal County Sheriff\u2019s Office spokesperson Sam Salzwedel noted that deputies have deployed Tangles for a \u201cvariety of investigations, large and small,\u201d but declined to share any success stories, citing law enforcement sensitivity. Salzwedel said that WebLoc, the warrantless phone tracking feature, appeared to be used sparingly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI have not surveyed our handful of users, but one of our analysts just told me he has only used it a few times,\u201d Salzwedel wrote in an email. \u201cNo warrant was obtained.\u201d<\/p>\n

A reimbursement request released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the privacy-focused nonprofit, and first reported by the Arizona Mirror<\/a>, offers a few anecdotes about how Tucson police have used Tangles: To surveil protesters during one of former Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s visits to the state and to track and identify a suspect accused in a string of Circle K cigarette robberies. Tucson police also apparently used Tangles in an attempt to find the culprit behind an attempted abduction of a young woman, but without success.<\/p>\n

Even police who possess Tangles, like Boyd, warn of its potential for abuse. He says his department seldom deploys it for fear of violating constitutional privacy rights\u2014and that despite leading a police task force, the sheriff is skeptical of cops collecting too much sensitive information.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you really want all your stuff in a database where any law enforcement official can go in and just find out what you\u2019ve got going on, or where you\u2019ve been going on any given day?\u201d he said. \u201cI just don\u2019t think that the government needs a catch-all where they can obtain whatever information they want on you at a moment\u2019s notice.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s Note: This story is the third installment in a series produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3436,6071,1978,27,29,28,63995],"class_list":["post-154964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-dps","tag-surveillance","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-the-ai-powered-eyes-of-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}