The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claimed on Monday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used huge volumes of people’s cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps to track their movements.
Thousands of pages of previously unreleased records about Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other parts of the Department of Homeland Security were published by the ACLU “sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures”.
The records, obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit over the last year, shed new light on the government’s ability to obtain the most private information by simply opening the federal wallet.
Law enforcement can use this information to “identify devices observed at places of interest,” as well as “identify repeat visitors, frequented locations, pinpoint known associates, and discover patterns of life.”
“By searching through this massive trove of location information at their whim, government investigators can identify and track specific individuals or everyone in a particular area, learning details of our private activities and associations,” the ACLU said in a statement.
The newly released documents shed light on the millions of taxpayer dollars spent by DHS to gain access to cell phone location data aggregated and sold by two shadowy data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street.
The documents expose those companies’ – and the government’s – efforts to justify the unrestricted sale of massive amounts of data in the face of US Supreme Court precedent protecting similar cell phone location data from warrantless government access, according to the ACLU.
“In the documents we received over the past year, we found Venntel marketing materials sent to DHS explaining how the company collects more than 15 billion location points from over 250 million cell phones and other mobile devices every day,” the report noted.
The government should not be allowed to buy its way out of fundamental constitutional safeguards against unreasonable searches of our personal information, it added.
Throughout the documents, cell phone location information is described as “digital exhaust” and “no PII” (personally identifying information) because it is associated with a cell phone’s numerical identifier rather than a name a” despite the fact that the entire purpose of this data is to be able to identify and track people.
The records also state that this data is “100% opt-in,” that cell phone users “voluntarily” share their location information, and that it is collected with the app user’s consent and “individual permission.”
“Of course, that consent is a fiction: Many cell phone users don’t realise 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,” said the ACLU.
The ACLU reviewed 6,168 pages of location records, which contained approximately 336,000 location points obtained from people’s phones.
The records for a three-day period in 2018 contain approximately 113,654 location points – more than 26 location points per minute.
“And that data appears to come from just one area in the Southwestern United States, meaning it is just a small subset of the total volume of people’s location information available to the agency,” the report mentioned.
The ACLU reviewed 6,168 pages of location records, which contained approximately 336,000 location points obtained from people’s phones.
The records for a three-day period in 2018 contain approximately 113,654 location points – more than 26 location points per minute.
These documents demonstrate that “Congress must pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would put an end to law enforcement agencies’ practise of buying their way out of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.”
According to the ACLU, lawmakers must seize the opportunity to end this massive invasion of privacy as soon as possible.
