The fusion of wiretaps with OSINT

New contract documents show that Cobwebs Technologies was helping federal law enforcement fuse wiretaps of major tech platforms with open source surveillance of Tinder.

Readers have likely noticed that this feed has been quiet for the last month or so. Partly that is due to a major ongoing project to fuse and expand Tech Inquiry’s military and intelligence knowledge graph and procurement feeds with a geospatial map of every major U.S. embassy, military installation, border enforcement office, FBI field office, etc. One relatively low-hanging piece of fruit emerging from this was a scraper for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s contracting feed, which I used to inform freedom of information requests for recent ‘border emergency’ contracts with facial recognition firm Clearview AI and internet surveillance firm Cobwebs. Both requests came back in about a week and resulted in this story three days ago.

But another major reason was a month-long investigation which published this morning — in collaboration with Sam Biddle of The Intercept — on a former Delta Force lieutenant colonel and a self-proclaimed “demon hunter” launching what they described as a counter-insurgency against the sex work industry. I stumbled into this story after noticing that both Cobwebs and the cellphone location-tracking intelligence contractor Anomaly Six had publicly partnered with the ominously named “Skull Games”. After digging in, I was shocked to further discover the organization’s widespread partnership with police in the usage of facial recognition from: FaceCheck.id, PimEyes, Clearview AI, and Ashton Kutcher’s Spotlight.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the investigation was editing the final article down to roughly 3000 words, as many important details invariably had to be cut. For example, a freedom of information request I had submitted in March for a sole-sourced contract between Cobwebs and the Missing and Murdered Unit of the Bureau of Indian Affairs listed the surveillance of the dating platform Tinder, as well as the fusion of wiretaps for Google and Facebook accounts with ‘open source’ intelligence, as core contractual requirements.

It was painful to sit on this document for so long, as it significantly predated Cobwebs being merged into the wiretapping technology company PenLink earlier this month. (You can find some of my previous writing on PenLink here, and some coverage of audio I collected from a presentation they gave at a sheriffs’ conference here.)

I have admittedly become allergic to partisan angles in investigations, but dispassionately following the facts in police surveillance has led me into evangelical rabbit holes including detailed discussions of exorcisms of the “head demons” supposedly responsible for society’s ills.

And, while working on a timeline of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center, I stumbled on a video of former counterintelligence head James M. Olson discussing the exorcism performed in a former Planned Parenthood building by the anti-abortion organization he co-founded while teaching at Texas A&M. As part of the two-part interview, Olson also emphasized the religious fervor common within the CIA during the Cold War and suggested the overturning of Roe v. Wade was analogous to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The ‘order of battle’ information on the CIA’s organizational hierarchy and timelines is a component of an ongoing effort to fuse publicly reported station chief postings with the more readily available diplomatic postings and associated embassy procurement feeds and leaked diplomatic cables. You can find a geospatial interface to this knowledge graph on the homepage of techinquiry.org.

The next major addition will be the incorporation of U.S. military installations — such as Joint Task Force Guantanamo — to make it easier for readers to explore Tech Inquiry’s detailed curation of military procurement feeds (which occasionally are as specific as particular units of Joint Special Operations Command). In the mean time, we have manually mirrored the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s map of border surveillance towers and have placed them alongside the associated border patrol stations and offices.