Surveillance for sale, Five Eyes under strain, AI power struggles: Best infosec long reads 11/7/26

Happy Saturday to all!

Full access to Metacurity's curated infosec long reads is available to paid subscribers. Our goal is simple: make it financially viable to keep investing the time and expertise required to find, vet, and contextualize the most important security journalism each week.

Free readers will still get highlights, but subscribers will get the complete, deeply curated set.

11/7/2026: This week’s long reads explore how everyday apps feed a global police surveillance system, why Trump is straining trust within Five Eyes, the beliefs driving Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, why open AI models don’t guarantee technological independence, and the battle to shape Democrats’ 2028 AI agenda.

Ads in Popular Apps Give Police a Powerful Tool to Spy on Users

An investigation by Bloomberg's Ryan Gallagher reveals how Penlink’s Webloc, an ad-based geolocation surveillance platform originally developed by Cobwebs Technologies, turns location data harvested through ordinary smartphone apps into a global surveillance tool for police and intelligence agencies, often without judicial oversight.

Penlink was founded in 1986 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Over decades, the company built up a trusted relationship with law enforcement agencies in the United States, providing surveillance technology that is used to collect and analyze wiretapped phone calls and internet data that is gathered during the course of investigations. Penlink’s customers have included the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the US Marshals, Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security and scores of state and local police departments, according to sales records reviewed by Bloomberg News.

Cobwebs was founded in 2015 by three veterans of Israeli special forces, who developed Webloc for use in counterterrorism, according to people familiar with its development, who declined to be identified as they weren’t authorized to speak to the media. The company managed to establish itself internationally, including in the US, but not without controversy.

In 2021, Meta Platforms Inc. banned about 200 accounts that it accused Cobwebs of using on its social media platforms Facebook and Instagram to trick people into revealing personal information. Meta said Cobwebs was involved in “targeting of activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico” and said that the company had customers in countries including Bangladesh, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.

After Meta’s report, Cobwebs ceased selling a product called Trapdoor, which it had used to infiltrate social media pages with fake accounts, according to the people familiar with the matter. The company instead began focusing its development and sales efforts on Webloc and a related product called Tangles, which is designed to carry out surveillance of social media activity, monitoring what people post online and analyzing connections between suspects.

In 2022, the New York private equity firm Spire Capital acquired Penlink, and then in 2023 acquired Cobwebs in a deal worth about $200 million, joining the two companies together.

Spire Capital appointed one of its own operating partners, Peter Weber, as Penlink’s Chief Executive Officer. Under Weber’s stewardship, Penlink has pushed to sell Webloc in global markets, and to expand its use from large national law enforcement and intelligence agencies to include local law enforcement departments and private security companies, according to people familiar with the company’s business.

Penlink customers who purchase Tangles can acquire Webloc as an add-on. Licenses for the technology start from around $100,000 per year, with the price rising depending on the number of users and amount of Webloc location data requested, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg.

Sean White, a partner at Spire Capital, said that Webloc had been “materially changed” after Cobwebs’ acquisition. The product is only available to law enforcement and public safety agencies, and “in rare instances, through authorized government contractors acting on their behalf,” White said, and not offered to enterprise customers.

Webloc has been used “to find missing children and return them to their families, identify suspects at the scene of a crime like a bank robbery, and identify human and drug trafficking organizations operating in the United States,” White said.

“We understand and respect the debate on law enforcement's ability to use commercially available data for its investigations,” he said. “We believe that law enforcement’s ability in the US to purchase access to commercially available data is still an open question as none of the recent court decisions address that issue.”

According to US government procurement records, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent around $9 million between 2022 and 2026 on four contracts with Cobwebs and Penlink, which included licenses for Webloc.

Amid concerns about ICE’s mass deportation campaign, a group of more than 70 Democrat lawmakers wrote to the Department of Homeland’s Security’s inspector general in March, seeking information about how the agency was using Webloc. They questioned whether ICE was using location data to “investigate Americans for engaging in constitutionally protected activities.” Representatives for the lawmakers said they had not yet received any response.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said: “ICE does not purchase illegal information. ICE only utilizes tools it has legal authority to use. We are not going to disclose law enforcement sensitive intelligence and methods. DHS law enforcement methods abide by the US Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment.”

State and local law enforcement across the US have also obtained the technology, including the Texas Department of Public Safety, police in Los Angeles, Dallas, Baltimore, Tucson, Durham, the City of Elk Grove in California and Arizona’s Pinal County, according to a report published in April by researchers at Citizen Lab, a technology research unit at the University of Toronto, which analyzed public procurement contracts.