Transcription
The DHS is using tools that can track every single phone in your neighborhood, figure out where you sleep, where you work, and who you hang out with, all without a single warrant or court order. This also isn't special technology. They're using the same advertising data that helps sell you sneakers on Instagram.
In this video, we're breaking down exactly how the DHS built one of the most powerful neighborhood surveillance systems ever seen in the US, what the tools they're using are, and why it's raising serious legal red flags, and what, if anything, you can actually do to protect yourself. Let's get into the details.
Over the past few years, DHS has been quietly building out a surveillance system that's pretty jaw-dropping in scale. The system monitors entire neighborhoods, every phone, every movement, every pattern, all at once. According to the detailed intelligence report from last month, this system pulls together sell site simulators, bulk advertising data, spyware, facial recognition, and digital forensics tools into one big operation. And a lot of it doesn't require any kind of warrant.
Let's discuss some of the specific technology. A Stingray, technically called a cell sight simulator, is a device that pretends to be a regular cell tower. Your phone is always looking for the strongest signal nearby, and it doesn't check whether that signal is actually from your carrier or from a fake tower sitting on a government van down the street. When you connect to a Stingray, it grabs your phone's unique ID number called an IMSI, along with your device ID, your location, and metadata about your calls and texts. And it's not just grabbing your data. It's grabbing every phone in range, likely hundreds or more in your neighborhood. ICE has them mounted in vehicles so that they can just drive through neighborhoods sweeping up phone identifiers from everyone around.
Now, here's a common misconception. Stingrays can't crack end to end encryption on apps like Signal or WhatsApp. They can capture that data, but they can't read it. Where they really shine is in older 2G networks, basic calls and text, and most importantly, identifying who is in the area. That's the foundation that they built everything else on.
And here's where it gets concerning. You've probably clicked allow on dozens of apps asking for your location, weather apps, food delivery apps, navigation apps, games. Those apps send your GPS coordinates to advertising networks. The data gets sold to data brokers, and those data brokers sell it to groups like the DHS. The tool DHS uses for this is called Web Lock, made by a Nebraska based company called Penlink. Here's what it can do. Agents draw a digital fence called a geoence around a neighborhood. Web lock then pulls up every phone that was in that area during a certain period of time. From there, they track where those phones went overnight to go figure out where people live. They track where those phones go during the day to find workplaces, and they can see who you spend time with based on which phones show up near yours repeatedly.
There's also a companion tool called Tangles, also created by Penlink, that pulls in your social media profiles, public records, license plate data, and facial recognition results to attach a real name and face to anonymous phone ID they found through web lock. And the crazy part, because DHS is buying this data rather than requesting it from phone carriers, they're arguing it doesn't count as search under the Fourth Amendment. No warrant needed.
But let's say someone uses encrypted apps. DHS has a workaround for that, too. In 2025, DHS reinstated a $2 million contract with an Israeli company called Paragon Solutions for something called Graphite. It's a piece of spyware that can get into your phone without you doing anything. It exploits security holes in your phone's operating system and installs itself silently. Once it's in, it can read your encrypted messages after they're decrypted on your device before you even see them. It can turn on your microphone, access your camera, grab your files, log your keystrokes, and if they physically get your device, DHS also uses tools from a company called Celebrite to crack open locked phones, and pull everything off of them, including your deleted files. Between April and June of last year, Custom and Border Protection searched about 15,000 devices using these tools.
Then there's the facial recognition. I recently made a video about how ICE deployed an app called Mobile Fortify that lets agents point their phone at cameras at someone's face during an encounter. Within seconds, it searches a database of roughly 200 million photos, passports, visa applications, driver licenses from certain states and returns the person's name, immigration status, and other details. Last fall, ICE was also picked up using iris scanning technology that can ID someone from 15 in away in just seconds. And the agents have also been spotted wearing meta rayband smart glasses, which can capture photos and video without obviously pointing a camera at anyone. Put it all together and you have a system that can identify, locate, and build a profile just about anyone walking down the street.
So, is any of this legal? That's the question that most people are asking, including members of Congress. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter versus United States that getting location history from phone carriers requires a warrant. That was a big deal, but ICE has been sidestepping that ruling by buying data from brokers instead of getting it from phone carriers directly and arguing the law doesn't apply to commercially purchased data. In October 2023, the DHS Inspector General actually found that ICE, CBP, and the Secret Service had violated laws around using phone location data. Representative Shantel Brown led an oversight letter to DHS in February 2026 demanding answers. A bill called the Fourth Amendment is not for sale act has been proposed, but as of now, nothing has passed. There's also a case called Shatri versus United States heading to the Supreme Court that challenges whether sweeping phone data from entire area is constitutional. That one could change things, but doesn't have a ruling yet.
Here's the thing that gets lost in most of the technical detail. When DHS dropped a geoence on a neighborhood or drives a Stingray van down a street, it isn't just picking up data on the person they're looking for. It's picking up data on everyone. US citizens, kids, lawyers, journalists, people who have nothing to do with immigration at all. And these tools have also been reportedly marked for monitoring protests and community organizing events. That's a First Amendment issue on top of the Fourth Amendment one.
And the core problem is that the law hasn't caught up to this technology. The advertising industry built a massive data collection machine to sell people stuff, and it accidentally created the perfect infrastructure for mass surveillance. Whether you think DHS's mission is important or not, a system that can monitor every phone in a neighborhood without a warrant, without oversight, or without you ever knowing is a system that can be pointed at anyone.
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