ACLU: DHS spent millions on phone location data

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
19 Jul 2022 00:11
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The US Department of Homeland Security spent millions of dollars on mobile phone location data to follow the actions of Americans and foreigners at US borders.

ACLU revealed in a report that DHS spent millions of dollars on mobile phone location data

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed in a report, on Monday, that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had spent millions of dollars on mobile phone location data to track the activities of Americans and foreigners at US borders.

"The released records shine a light on the millions of taxpayer dollars DHS used to buy access to cell phone location information being aggregated and sold by two shadowy data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street," the report read.

Per the documents obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act, the two companies and the government were attempting to "rationalize this unfettered sale." The DHS-purchased data enabled law enforcement to follow specific people or everyone in a specified region, identify their devices' positions at "places of interest," as well as learn about regular visitors, find patterns, and gather other crucial information. The ACLU claimed that officials were obtaining information on national security inadvertently.

There is no end run around the Fourth Amendment.

Congress needs to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would require the government to secure a court order before buying our data from brokers. https://t.co/mq3RotZIEU
— ACLU (@ACLU) July 18, 2022

"The government should not be allowed to purchase its way around bedrock constitutional protections against unreasonable searches of our private information," the report added.

The ACLU observed that both corporations and law enforcement organizations were attempting to defend their operations by claiming in papers that phone users freely gave their location data.

"Of course, that consent is a fiction: Many cell phone users don’t realize how many apps on their phones are collecting GPS information, and certainly don’t expect that data to be sold to the government in bulk," the report read.

Over 6,000 pages of information with roughly 336,000 location points gleaned from people's cell phones have been examined by the ACLU. According to the ACLU, a DHS internal memo from 2018 suggested utilizing the location data to determine trends in illegal immigration, which the group claims would "indiscriminately sweep in information about people going about their daily lives in border communities."

The ACLU asked the US Congress to demand an immediate end to this DHS behavior.