Texas State Police Gear Up for Massive Expansion of Surveillance Tech
Summary
Wolfie Christl, a public interest researcher and digital rights activist based in Vienna, Austria, argues that data collected for a specific purpose, such as navigation or dating apps, should not be used by different parties for unrelated reasons. … This cannot be how our future digital society looks like.” While a device’s mobile ad ID is technically an anonymous piece of information, it is easy to cross reference other data points to determine the owner, according to Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2023, Cobwebs Technologies was acquired by the Nebraska-based tech firm PenLink Ltd. Christl, the Austria-based digital rights researcher, said that companies selling software that incorporates data harvested from mobile phone apps have greatly expanded the definition of OSINT tools. “Both price-wise and privacy-wise.” In a written statement, a PenLink spokesperson told the Observer their “open-source intelligence (OSINT) solutions are used to protect our communities from crime, threats, and cyber-attacks by providing seamless access to data that is publicly available. The agency first purchased the software as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar Operation Lone Star border crackdown, doling out an initial $200,000 contract as an “emergency award” with no public solicitation.