ICE expands vehicle surveillance capabilities with forensics platform, covert GPS trackers U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is moving to maintain two complementary technologies capable of reconstructing where vehicles have been and following where they go. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced that it intends to renew its existing Berla iVe vehicle forensics platform, which can recover navigation histories, GPS track logs and information left behind by phones connected to vehicle infotainment systems. A day later, HSI posted another sole-source procurement notice for “specialized devices” from Ensurity Mobile Corp., the company that supplied its Technical Operations Unit with hundreds of covert GPS tracking devices last year. The two procurements illuminate different sides of vehicle surveillance. Berla iVe allows investigators who have lawfully obtained access to a vehicle to examine the digital history stored inside it. Ensurity’s trackers allow investigators, acting under applicable legal authority, to follow a vehicle over time without maintaining a surveillance team continuously behind it. HSI’s Office of Acquisition said in its August 28 notice that Berla Corporation of Annapolis, Maryland, is the only reasonably available source for renewal of the agency’s existing iVe hardware and software. The notice does not disclose the anticipated value, number of licenses or which HSI offices use the platform. Modern infotainment and telematics systems can retain considerably more information than radio settings. Depending on the vehicle, Berla says iVe can recover recent destinations, navigation histories, saved locations and timestamped GPS track logs. Vehicle systems can also retain records associated with doors, lights and other events and identify phones and devices connected through Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or USB. Where information has been synchronized with the vehicle, investigators may recover contact lists, call logs and SMS messages. Some systems also retain where the vehicle was when a particular Bluetooth device connected. That does not mean