That United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents continue to pitch fits over protesters filming and tracking their moves in the communities they’re swarming is tinged with irony, since ICE itself appears to be aggressively doing the same using a social media and phone surveillance system to track citizens’ devices and monitor neighborhoods.

The system developed by PenLink, a subsidiary of Cobwebs Technologies, gathers data through data brokers on “hundreds of millions” of devices, tracks their movement and that of their owners, among other actions, according to a report by 404 Media, which viewed internal ICE documents explaining how the system works.

Those actions, to say the least likely tread and trample U.S. privacy laws and run afoul of Fourth Amendment protection, since ICE can apparently tap the data in the system without a warrant.

“As technology and communications companies have grown, they’ve accumulated tons of data knowing that people won’t read the terms of service,” says John Bambenek, president of Bambenek Consulting. 

Mobile devices, in particular, he says, “are a gateway into deep details into our everyday lives, which is why stalker ware is prolific on mobile devices.” 

That sure is underscored by ICE’s tracking activities using readily available tech. In an interview with MPR News, 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox explained that ICE has recently acquired social media monitoring tool Tangles, which scrapes social media sites and makes the information accessible. That’s not uncommon.

“What’s different here is that Tangles is in combination with the tool called Webloc,” another tool that ICE has invested in, “gives an all-in-one solution for following people online,” Cox told MPRNews. “When it comes to their social media activity, ICE officials can add them to a watch list so they will be alerted whenever this person posts.”

And then they can use AI “to build some sort of sentiment analysis about what they’re posting as well,” he explained. “The idea is that whenever somebody posts something online that ICE is interested in, the officials are going to see it.”

Coupled with Webloc, which also gathers location data and then provides it via a map interface for phones, the system offers a more complete picture of who protesters are and what they are doing, their habits and perhaps even their associations. 

“You log into the interface, you draw a circle or rectangle around a place of interest, maybe an ICE facility, maybe somewhere where a protest is happening,” Cox said. “It then shows all of the location data and phones it has for that location, and the user is able to then track the phones to other places.” 

That so much data is available for these tools to gather is concerning. “What’s probably shocking to folks is the volume of useful data that data brokers have collected on them,” says Trey Ford, chief strategy and trust officer at Bugcrowd.

“The data they’ve (willfully, or unknowingly) entrusted their applications and software service providers with is considerably harder to get for law enforcement through intelligence channels – is commercially available for anyone to purchase,” he says.

And, says Bambenek, “the problem is that we can’t imagine all the bad ways some data can be used, and until it actually happens, there’s never any protest.”

Although concern about government and law enforcement access is understandable, Ford says, “I’m not sure why we’d be comfortable with anyone else collecting and selling this information.”