Shontel Brown

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown of Warrensville Heights is demanding a briefing from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s acquisition of surveillance tools that can track the location of cellphones across entire neighborhoods without a warrant.

Brown, who serves as the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform’s subcommittee on cybersecurity and information technology, made the request in a Thursday letter to Noem. It demands that DHS brief committee staff by March 5 on the agency’s use of surveillance technology from a company called Penlink.

“Mass surveillance of entire communities or city blocks raises serious questions about data privacy and potential violations of civil liberties,” Brown wrote.

The letter comes in response to reports that ICE purchased access to tools from a company called Penlink — specifically, its Webloc and Tangles products — in September 2025. Webloc allows agents to “geofence” a specific area and track all phones within it, drawing on a database updated daily with billions of location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices.

Tangles is a social media surveillance tool which combines web scraping with access to social media application programming interfaces, allowing ICE to build a dossier on anyone who has a public social media account, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group that defends digital civil liberties.

“Location data can reveal intimate details of a person’s life, including where they live, work, worship, go to school, or seek medical care,” Brown’s letter said, quoting the American Civil Liberties Union calling the technology “a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.”

“DHS could use these tools to identify individuals for targeting based solely on their presence in certain locations, without a warrant or probable cause and regardless of their citizenship or residency status,” Brown’s letter continued.

Brown also raised alarm about a separate DHS contract with the foreign spyware company Paragon. That software can reportedly gain full access to all information on a mobile device — including encrypted applications, location data, and messages and photographs — without the device owner’s knowledge or consent. The Washington Post has reported that DHS has significantly expanded the operational scope for its use of facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and other advanced surveillance technologies.

Taken together, Brown wrote, these acquisitions suggest DHS “is relying on mass data collection techniques that the Department can use without cell phone users’ knowledge and which may operate outside of constitutional guardrails.”

The letter lays out four specific areas Brown wants addressed in the briefing:

The internal DHS communications surrounding the acquisition of location-based surveillance tools.

Any legal justification the agency has identified for conducting mass electronic surveillance without a judicial or administrative warrant.

How DHS plans to store, use, and dispose of data collected through the Penlink system.

Who will have access to that data and how potential abuses will be monitored.

“Americans should be able to trust their government to uphold the Constitution and respect fundamental rights,” Brown wrote. “Instead, DHS appears to be engaging in broad surveillance practices to monitor entire communities, violating Americans’ basic civil rights and civil liberties to punish dissent and advance the president’s cruel and unconstitutional mass deportation agenda.”