Feds tracking phone locations with third party data

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) unveiled in previously unreleased records that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been acquiring location data of its targets from third parties to avert requiring a warrant to pursue a certain person of interest.

The documents show that DHS is not alone in purchasing its way around the US constitution, as agencies such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were able to purchase tons of location data without any oversight before using it to track the movements of millions of cellphones within the United States.

Though technically not a violation of the constitution, the practice is incredibly shady.

Obtaining data about communication within the United States from telecommunication providers requires the agency seeking to acquire the data to obtain a warrant, which must be approved by a judge. However, there is no law against buying data from brokers and shady third-party companies that are not subjected to any constraints. 

For a small sum of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, federal and law enforcement agencies can get unrestricted access to every US citizen's privacy and gather personal data about them that they would otherwise be unable to access.

The vast amounts of location data disclosed in the released documents show that the US government has gone to extents never expected before and it indicates that federal agencies are carrying out an even larger acquisition of location data behind the scenes.

The ACLU was granted access to the documents under the freedom of information laws after they and the NYCLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records from CBP, ICE, and other parts of the DHS about their purchasing of cell phone location data.

The revelations made by the lawsuit include a set of spreadsheets containing the location data purchased from Venntel, a telecom data broker, with an analysis finding that for one three-day span in 2018, the records contained 113,654 locations points, more than 26 points recorded per minute.

Due to the data's confinement to a geographic area in the Southwest, it is proven to be only a fraction of the actual volume of data obtained by federal agencies.

Emails between Venntel and the ICE show that the third-party firm claimed to have collected location data from some 250 million mobile devices and processed more than 15 billion location data points every 24 hours.

The documents also revealed that another data broker, Babel Street, garners location data by paying developers to code its code into mobile apps, which goes unbeknownst to users as the apps send data back to the company's servers.

"The Supreme Court has made clear that because our cell phone location history reveals so many 'privacies of life,' it is deserving of full Fourth Amendment protection," said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

"Yet, here we see data brokers and government agencies tying themselves in knots trying to explain how people can lack an expectation of privacy in such obviously personal and sensitive location information. With the potential for abuse so high, Congress must step in to definitively end this practice," he added.

Phone-tracking companies have long been mired in location data-related controversy. Ahead of the start of the war in Ukraine, two unknown American firms met to explore a prospective surveillance alliance that would combine the capacity to follow the movements of billions of people through their phones with a steady feed of data acquired straight from Twitter.

Anomaly Six, a Virginia-based firm founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officials, eavesdropped on the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using their own smartphones against them.

The company is one of many that buys massive amounts of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people all over the world by taking advantage of smartphone apps harvesting location data and transferring it to advertisers.

According to public records, US Special Operations Command paid Anomaly Six $590,000 in September 2020 for a year of access to the firm's "commercial telemetry feed."