The DHS Bought a ‘Shocking Amount’ of Phone-Tracking Data

For a long time, people have wondered how much the Department of Homeland Security is able to access mobile location data. The American Civil Liberties Union released thousands of heavily redacted pages of documents that show how DHS agencies came to leverage a shocking amount of location data without following proper protocols.

Over the course of the last year, documents were shared with the American Civil Liberties Union. The Department of Homeland Security contracted with two companies, Babel Street and Venntel, to access more than 336,000 location data points across North America, according to a report. According to the collection of emails, contracts, spreadsheets, and presentation slides, the Trump administration's immigration enforcers used mobile location data to track people's movements on a larger scale than previously known.

According to the majority of the new information, the DHS has a contract with a data broker that sells location data to solve the world's most challenging problems. According to documents, the US Customs and Border Patrol said that their location data helped improve their investigations.

It's not clear if the practice was legal, but the DHS was ordered to stop all projects involving Venntel data in June of 2019. The privacy and legal teams came to an agreement on use terms because the Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed a new contract for location data last winter.

The practice of buying access to and using huge volumes of people's cell phone location is still described as shadowy by the American Civil Liberties Union. An email from DHS's senior director of privacy compliance confirmed that the department appeared to have purchased access to Venntel even though a required Privacy Threshold Assessment was never approved, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The DHS agencies mentioned in the story did not respond to the request for comment.

There are no laws preventing data sales to the government according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The Fourth Amendment is not for Sale Act is endorsed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The new law would allow government agencies to continue tracking mobile location data even if that bill passes. The American Civil Liberties Union didn't respond to any concerns about the exceptions.

There is a way to stop location data tracking.

The question is whether the Supreme Court decision that police must have a warrant to search cell phone data applies to the Department of Homeland Security. The Congressional Research Service says that the Supreme Court has long recognized that the government may conduct routine inspections and searches of individuals entering the US without a warrant.

There are other government agencies that consider themselves an exception. The Department of Defense has its own data handling requirements and the Defense Intelligence Agency purchased location data without a warrant.