For many years, people was wondering if, but how much, Department of Homeland Security accessing mobile location data to monitor US citizens. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union released Thousands of pages of heavily edited documents provides “a glimpse” of how DHS agencies have leveraged “shocking amounts of location data”, apparently purchasing data without following proper protocols to ensure they have the authority to do so so.
The document has been shared with the ACLU”last year through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.“Then Politico got access and issue a report confirmed that DHS has contracted with two surveillance companies, Babel Street and Venntel, to scour hundreds of millions of cell phones between 2017 and 2019 and access “more than 336,000 location data points across North America.” America.” The collection of emails, contracts, spreadsheets and slides provides evidence that “the Trump administration’s immigration enforcers have been using mobile location data to track people’s movements across the globe.” larger scale than previously known,” and the practice has continued under Biden due to a contract that doesn’t expire until 2021.
Much of the new information details an expanded contract DHS made with Venntel, a data broker that says it sells mobile location data to solve “the world’s toughest problems.” .” In the documents, US Customs and Border Patrol said Venntel’s location data has helped it improve immigration enforcement and investigations into human and drug trafficking.
It’s not yet clear if the practice is legal, but one DHS privacy officer was concerned enough about privacy and legal concerns that DHS was ordered to “stop all related projects.” regarding Venntel data” in June 2019. It appears that the legal and privacy teams, however, have come to an agreement on terms of use, as the purchase of location data has continued. continues, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement signing a new Venntel contract last winter that runs through June 2023.
The ACLU still describes the fact that it is “insinuating” that DHS agencies still owe them more documents would show that they are “evading” the “Fourth Amendment” against unreasonable government searches and seizures. government by purchasing access to and using large volumes of people’s cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps. Of particular concern, the ACLU also noted that an email from the senior director of privacy compliance for DHS confirming that DHS “appears to have purchased access to Venntel despite the required Privacy Threshold Assessment.” was never approved.”
DHS did not comment on the Politico story, and neither DHS agencies nor the ACLU immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.
The ACLU said there is currently no law preventing the sale of data to the government, but that could soon change. ACLU confirms an invoice called The Fourth Amendment is not the Sales Act, is designed to do just that. However, even if that bill were passed, the new law would still provide some exceptions that would allow government agencies to continue tracking mobile location data. The ACLU did not immediately respond to comment on any concerns about those exceptions.
How to Stop Tracking Location Data
The main question being debated is whether a decision of the Supreme Court in 2017 that said police must have a cell phone data tracing order that applies to government agencies like the DHS. Its a gray area because, said the Congressional Research Service, “The Supreme Court has long recognized that the government may conduct periodic inspections and searches of individuals entering the U.S. border without a warrant” and that “several federal courts have imposed a ‘border search exception’ to permit relatively limited, manual searches of the borders of electronic devices such as computers and cell phones.”
However, DHS is not the only government agency that considers itself an exception. In 2021, The Defense Intelligence Agency also buys location data without a warrantignored the 2017 Supreme Court decision because the Department of Defense has its own “Minister of Justice Approved Data Processing Request”.
