Editor’s Note: This story is the third installment in a series produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.
Goliad County police kicked off one human smuggling investigation not with a suspect’s 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.
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’s 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.
The stub of paper was enough, Boyd said, to justify deploying an expensive—and controversial—artificial intelligence-powered surveillance tool called Tangles. A specially-trained analyst used the receipt, Boyd said, to conduct warrantless surveillance on the suspected driver—and on other smart phone users—by utilizing a Tangles add-on feature called Webloc, which tracks mobile devices’ movements in a client-selected virtual area through a capability called “geofencing.”
After the bailout incident, Boyd acquired a license for the tool with about $300,000 in state border security grants—though the sheriff admits that he’s not a tech guy: In 2024, he still used a hand-me-down iPhone 10, which hit the market in 2017.
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 “Remember Goliad,” referencing the Mexican army’s massacre of Anglo combatants who lost a battle in which Boyd says his ancestors died.
Boyd worked as a career cop in the neighboring South Texas city of Victoria before being elected sheriff of Goliad County in 2020. He’s 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, Governor Greg Abbott’s 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.
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.
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 has created a free-for-all that enables police and others to purchase massive amounts of cell phone location data without judicial review.
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’s ability to buy location data constitutes an erosion of constitutionally protected rights. “Police are doing an end run around this well-articulated system of judicial oversight by just paying money instead of going to a judge,” he said. “There’s just no checks of police abuse against that.”
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