Investigators raised alarm bells once they realized Homeland Security bureaus have been shopping for cellphone location information to successfully bypass the Fourth Amendment requirement for a search warrant, and now it is clearer simply how in depth these purchases have been. TechCrunch notes the American Civil Liberties Union has obtained data linking Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and different DHS divisions to purchases of roughly 336,000 cellphone location factors from the information dealer Venntel. The information represents only a “small subset” of uncooked information from the southwestern US, and features a burst of 113,654 factors collected over simply three days in 2018.

The dataset, delivered by way of a Freedom of Information Act request, additionally outlines the companies’ makes an attempt to justify the majority information purchases. Officials maintained that customers voluntarily supplied the information, and that it included no personally figuring out info. As TechCrunch explains, although, that is not essentially correct. Phone homeowners aren’t essentially conscious they opted in to location sharing, and certain did not notice the federal government was shopping for that information. Moreover, the information was nonetheless tied to particular units — it would not have been tough for brokers to hyperlink positions to people.

Some Homeland Security employees expressed inside considerations in regards to the location information. One senior director warned that the Office of Science and Technology purchased Venntel information with out getting a necessaryPrivacy Threshold Assessment. At one level, the division even halted all tasks utilizing Venntel information after studying that key authorized and privateness questions had gone unanswered.

More particulars may very well be forthcoming, as Homeland Security continues to be anticipated to supply extra paperwork in response to the FOIA request. We’ve requested Homeland Security and Venntel for remark. However, the ACLU report may gas legislative efforts to ban these sorts of information purchases, together with the Senate’s bipartisan Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act in addition to the extra just lately launched Health and Location Data Protection Act.