Homeland Security Is Buying Its Way Around the Fourth Amendment

[jim bell]

 Homeland Security Is Buying Its Way Around the Fourth Amendment 
https://share.newsbreak.com/1goc7w5v

American taxpayers pay to be spied upon. That's one takeaway from new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been examining how federal agents spent millions to purchase massive troves of cellphone location data and dodge Fourth Amendment requirements.

As part of a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the ACLU obtained thousands of previously unreleased records showing how DHS agencies—including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—are purchasing and accessing "huge volumes of people's cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps."

These agencies are "sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures," suggests the ACLU.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court held (in Carpenter v. United States) that under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement must have a warrant before accessing a suspect's phone location data from cellular service providers. But federal authorities have been getting around this by purchasing aggregated cellphone location data from data broker firms like Venntel and Babel Street. And they're spending millions of taxpayer dollars doing it.

This was first revealed by the Wall Street Journal back in 2020. The ACLU then set out to learn more, filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and later suing to force DHS, ICE, and CBP to respond.

"Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date," the ACLU announced yesterday.

Cellphone location data purchased by DHS is aggregated. It doesn't directly link the names or personal information of cellphone users to specific location data. But there's still a lot of privacy-infringing information that can be gleaned from such information, says 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.

With this data, law enforcement can "identify devices observed at places of interest," and "identify repeat visitors, frequented locations, pinpoint known associates, and discover pattern of life," according to a Venntel marketing brochure. The documents belabor how precise and illuminating this data is, allowing "pattern of life analysis to identify persons of interest." 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.

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