This Nebraska company is supplying ICE with surveillance tech

In the fall, ICE signed a $2.3 million contract for access to two surveillance tools made by Penlink: Tangles and Webloc. Penlink also makes analytics tools used by many Nebraska law enforcement agencies. Illustration by Hanscom Park Studio
By Natalia Alamdari, Flatwater Free Press

Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaders are using two surveillance tools owned by a Nebraska company, including one allowing ICE to track cellphone locations without a warrant, during high-profile crackdowns in cities like Minneapolis.  

Penlink, a digital intelligence company founded in Lincoln in the 1980s, has long been a player in the law enforcement technology world. Its data analytics tool is used by Nebraska law enforcement agencies like the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and the Omaha Police Department and state entities like the Nebraska State Patrol and the Department of Motor Vehicles’ Fraud Investigation Unit. 

Its early technology started with creating new software for the Lincoln Police Department, an agency it still works with to help develop new programs. 

Over the decades, the company has racked up federal contracts and acquired other tech companies. This fall, ICE signed a $2.3 million contract to use two tools now owned by Penlink: Tangles and Webloc.

Tangles is “open source intelligence” software that scrapes information from across the internet for law enforcement. Webloc is a cellphone database that allows users to track the movements of specific phones — without needing a warrant. 

Forbes and 404 Media first reported on ICE’s use of Penlink surveillance tools. 

Law enforcement officials, including Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson, told the Flatwater Free Press that Penlink makes tools that investigators should have access to. These tools pull from vast amounts of data already accessible to the public. It’s the same information being sold to advertisers, attorneys and political groups, they said.

“If it’s publicly accessible to anybody, it should be publicly accessible to law enforcement. If it’s not, then law enforcement needs to pursue a warrant,” Hanson said. “Why should drug cartels or other well-funded individuals be the only ones to access that data that is accessible to anybody else if you purchase it?” 

To civil liberties advocates, enabling law enforcement to surveil and track people without a warrant is a massive overstep, one that’s ripe for abuse. 

“The Penlink platform at this point functions as something like a data aggregator and searcher,” said Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on civil liberties in the digital era. “But the types of data it pulls together are a bit sketchier than I think people would expect.” 

Penlink was founded in 1987 by Lincoln native Mike Murman. Today, it still has space in a nondescript south Lincoln office building. 

The company got its start after Murman left Selection Research Inc. — now Gallup — to start his own venture, he told 10/11 News in 2019. 

His former company eventually sued, claiming he was using trade secrets to build his new tech company. The Nebraska Supreme Court eventually ruled in Murman’s favor. 

The company eventually started developing software for the Lincoln Police Department to automatically collect pen register data — phone records such as when a call was made, to whom and how long it lasted. Unlike a wiretap, they don’t record audio. 

In 1993, Penlink was awarded a contract with the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. 

“It gave the U.S. government the capability to collect intercepted phone information from any vendor’s product and put it into one database for analytics,” Murman said in 2019.

The company expanded its software into wiretaps. It then started developing software that could comb the internet, track smartphones and collect data as the use of those technologies became widespread in the 21st century. 

“By the time I left, every kid in the home had a wireless phone. They were streaming on their computers and chatting on their computer,” Murman told 10/11. “We had to be able to intercept all those forms of communication.” 

Murman sold the company in 2013. He now owns Glacial Till Vineyard in Ashland and Palmyra.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated where Glacial Till Vineyard is located.

Through his son, Murman declined to comment on Penlink’s current contracts with ICE. 

“My dad’s been gone (from Penlink) for a decade plus,” son Tim Murman said. “We don’t know what goes on there or what they’re doing.”

Today, the Penlink tool commonly used by Nebraska agencies is PLX — a platform that lets investigators organize mass amounts of data in one place, multiple law enforcement agencies told the Flatwater Free Press. 

Investigators take records obtained from a subpoena or a warrant, such as cellphone records and social media data. That information gets uploaded into PLX. 

“Essentially, it’s a way for us to sort the data,” said Hanson, the Douglas County sheriff. “Those downloads can be voluminous.” 

Local agencies like the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and Omaha and Lincoln police departments all use PLX, known as an industry standard to investigators handling large amounts of data. 

The Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles also signed a five-year, $159,000 contract with Penlink in 2024. The department’s Fraud Investigation Unit uses it for cases tied to identity theft and stolen vehicles, said Rhonda Lahm, the department’s director. The Nebraska State Patrol has also had a PLX contract with Penlink since 2011. 

“It’s nice to be able to use a product from a Nebraska-based company,” Hanson said. “But it’s also a product that gives results.”

The agencies that spoke with the Flatwater Free Press about PLX do not use Tangles or Webloc, the Penlink products recently purchased by ICE.

In 2022, the New York-based private equity firm Spire Capital became the controlling investors in Penlink. The company has offices in Lincoln, Washington and San Diego, as well as seven international offices. 

A year later, Penlink bought Cobwebs, a cyber intelligence company founded by former Israeli intelligence agents. The purchase of Cobwebs added Tangles and Webloc to Penlink’s suite of software. 

Penlink describes Tangles as “AI-powered open-source intelligence,” pulling data from the open, deep and dark web. That includes social media, forums, blog posts and news articles. It also scrapes stolen data that has been leaked on the dark web. It can detect faces, building dossiers out of a person’s internet history. That data is then sold to law enforcement agencies. 

Webloc lets clients search its databases of mobile phone data. Users can search in a specific area for cellphone movement in a specific time period. Once they pinpoint a phone they’re interested in, they can access more details about that phone by seeing where else it has traveled, essentially building a log of a person’s day. 

Penlink hasn’t said how it gets that data in the first place. But data brokers tend to gather detailed location and demographic data through the smartphone apps we use every day; through the advertisements we’re presented. Data brokers and surveillance firms then sell that data to government agencies. 

Penlink did not respond to phone calls or email requests for comment. 

A Penlink spokesperson in January told 404 Media via email that the tools it provides to ICE and other agencies “exclusively use publicly or commercially available data and are used to advance criminal investigations to save lives.” 

Information that the public is able to purchase through data brokers should also be available to  law enforcement, Hanson said. He pointed to cases where third-party data has helped sheriff’s deputies: DNA and genealogy data have helped identify bodies and find potential relatives; and open source data has helped investigators connect IP addresses to scammers and traffickers.

But open source tools like Tangles also pull more sensitive, sometimes stolen information, Lipton said. Data accessed through data breaches or by hackers then gets dumped onto the dark web. Tools like Tangles and Webloc pull together that granular data that law enforcement would typically need a warrant to obtain. 

Instead, they can purchase that data from commercial providers like Penlink. Framing that information as “open source” can be misleading, Lipton said. 

“I can hear why the sheriff would say, ‘Well, if any stranger can buy that information, why can’t I buy that information?’” Lipton said. “I would argue any stranger should not be able to buy that information.”

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