Israeli firm taught U.S. police how to "target" BLM, Antifa, and Jan 6 protestors through social media
Leaked training materials from Cobwebs Technologies detail how police could use its Tangles software to "target" BLM, Antifa, and January 6 protestors, as well as an anonymous independent journalist.
Training materials from the Israeli surveillance firm Cobwebs Technologies, which are being published here for the first time, detail the sophisticated social media analysis techniques which the firm provided to U.S. police and private investigators through its Tangles product. A roughly 30 page manual produced during the height of the George Floyd protests demonstrates how to “target” the Black Lives Matter movement and Antifa through their social media networks, while a 2022 manual applies similar techniques to a peaceful January 6 protestor who did not enter the U.S. Capitol.
Founded by alumni of Israeli special forces and intelligence units, Cobwebs rose to prominence in late 2021 when the social media giant Meta banned the company for its “surveillance-for-hire” practices. Cobwebs nevertheless landed contracts with major U.S. police departments — including the NYPD, LAPD, and Texas State Police — as well as the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security Intelligence, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In mid-2023, Cobwebs was acquired for $200 million by a private equity firm and merged into the Nebraska-based wiretapping technology company PenLink.
Cobwebs is now one component of PenLink’s rebranding as an artificial intelligence-driven company, combining its traditional social media wiretapping platform PLX with open source intelligence (OSINT) and large language models. As previously reported by the author, PLX helps police wiretap targets’ Google searches, Facebook accounts, cellphone location data, and — through a clever use of Apple iCloud backups — sometimes also end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages.
After being emailed for detailed comment in relation to the surveillance of social justice movements described in the Cobwebs training manuals, PenLink stated through the public relations agency Yes& that:
“Penlink customers address critical security challenges and work to deliver justice, playing a vital role in protecting communities and ensuring public safety.
Penlink does not comment on customer engagements. From a technology perspective, Penlink operates according to the law, adhering to stringent standards and regulations.”
Dataminr, an American social media monitoring company which reached a valuation of $4.1 billion in 2021 before significant layoffs late last year, became controversial in 2020 for its surveillance software being used to monitor widespread U.S. protests over the police killing of George Floyd. Dataminr marketing carefully fought off the term ‘surveillance’ by instead characterizing its functionality as ‘alerting,’ alongside instituting a ban for police searches on the term “protest.”
By contrast, a Cobwebs Tangles training manual first published here explicitly demonstrates “targets” such as: the Black Lives Matter DC Twitter account (@DMVBlackLives), the Twitter hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #DefundDCPolice, the “predominantly Black-led” activist group Freedom Fighters DC, and a now-defunct Twitter account tracking Indianapolis protests (@IndianapolisPr4).
The Tangles manual also dedicated a figure to the social network of the antifascist Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front, a “decentralized network” whose website appears to have gone inactive in the months preceding the report.
Another listed target in the Cobwebs training manual was an anonymous independent journalist who previously ran the RawsMedia Twitter account, who had recently been filmed shortly after being allegedly shot in the leg with a projectile by DC police while covering a Black Lives Matter protest. (Another figure maps out the Twitter friends of the 22-year-old barber Jhonatan Kirchhoff, who had recently pled guilty to attempting to smuggle cocaine into England from Brazil.)
Beyond Tangles providing visualizations of each target’s social network — that is, the accounts they interact with — the 2020 training manual also provides an overview of how a user can be geographically monitored. Visualized locations for a target include not only their geo-tagged posts, which attach their phone’s GPS location at the time of publication, but also known addresses of the target, their “friends,” and any events they were known to have attended.
Just months following publication of the initial training manual, the focus of U.S. police dramatically shifted as a result of the pro-Donald Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, which many characterized as an attempted insurrection. Liberal-leaning civil society groups similarly adapted, applying controversial surveillance tools such as facial recognition and commercial cellphone location-tracking to identify and track the attendees.
Just as the chatroom infiltration contractor Flashpoint pivoted from surveilling environmental protestors to monitoring antivaccine groups, Cobwebs happily transitioned from helping police surveil the Black Lives Matter movement to targeting January 6 protestors. A 27 page training manual published here for the first time almost entirely focuses on a single target: Dallas-based real-estate agent and January 6 protestor Brian Miller, who reportedly never entered the U.S. Capitol, despite having flown to the event on a private jet with friends who did.
When reached for comment regarding an Israeli surveillance firm essentially dedicating an entire training manual to his targeting, Mr. Miller stated that he hadn’t “been harassed or anything else in a while,” and that his “friend Jenna Ryan gets most of the publicity since she did go in and was jailed.” Ms. Ryan was released from prison in February 2022 after a 60 day sentence.
The 2022 Cobwebs targeting manual closes with a prominent disclaimer, including that “No conclusive evidence relating to criminal activity has been found and [the profiles mentioned in this report] should all be presumed innocent.”
Too bad none of the surveillance or defense tools help folks stranded by hurricane carnage.