Feds are tracking phone locations with data bought from brokers - The Verge

Documents obtained by the ACLU through a FOIA lawsuit reveal that federal agencies under the Department of Homeland Security are contracting with data brokers such as Venntel and Babel Street to buy huge amounts of location data without requiring any judicial oversight.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been buying location data from third parties to sidestep the traditional warrant process, according to new documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The documents show that agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were able to purchase vast amounts of this location data without any judicial oversight and use it to track the movements of millions of cellphones within the US.

Generally, obtaining data about domestic communications directly from the providers (i.e., telecom companies) requires a warrant, which must be approved by a judge. But purchasing data from intermediary organizations is not subject to the same constraints and effectively gives law enforcement agencies carte blanche to gather personal data that they would not otherwise be able to access.

The volume of location data disclosed in the newly released documents is huge and points toward an even greater level of data acquisition being carried out by the agencies concerned. The documents were obtained by the ACLU under freedom of information laws after a lawsuit was filed in 2020, following reporting by The Wall Street Journal that uncovered the purchase of commercial location data by government agencies.

Some of the records released to the ACLU included a set of spreadsheets containing a subset of location data purchased by CBP from the data broker Venntel. Per the ACLU’s analysis, for one three-day span in 2018, the records contain around 113,654 location points — equalling more than 26 location points recorded per minute. But even this data is confined to one geographic area in the Southwest, suggesting it’s only a fraction of the total volume of location data that federal agencies obtained.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23268592/feds-buying-location-data-brokers-aclu-foia-dhs

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