It's all part of a troubling pattern that shows a growing preference for the practice across many government agencies that have considered themselves exempt from legal concerns over the past few years. The ACLU still describes the practice as “shadowy,” saying that DHS agencies still owed them more documents that would further show how they are “sidestepping” the “Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures by buying access to, and using, huge volumes of people's cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps.” Of particular concern, the ACLU also noted that an email from DHS's senior director of privacy compliance confirmed that DHS “appeared to have purchased access to Venntel even though a required Privacy Threshold Assessment was never approved.” It seems that the privacy and legal teams, however, came to an agreement on use terms, because the purchase of location data has since resumed, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement signing a new Venntel contract last winter that runs through June 2023. It's still unclear whether the practice was legal, but a DHS privacy officer was worried enough about privacy and legal concerns that DHS was ordered to “stop all projects involving Venntel data” in June 2019. The majority of the new information details an extensive contract DHS made with Venntel, a data broker that says it sells mobile location data to solve “the world's most challenging problems.” In documents, US Customs and Border Patrol said Venntel's location data helped them improve immigration enforcement and investigations into human trafficking and narcotics. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast.ĭocuments were shared with the ACLU “ over the course of the last year through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.” Then Politico got access and released a report confirming that DHS contracted with two surveillance companies, Babel Street and Venntel, to scour hundreds of millions of cell phones from 2017 to 2019 and access “more than 336,000 location data points across North America.” The collection of emails, contracts, spreadsheets, and presentation slides provide evidence that “the Trump administration's immigration enforcers used mobile location data to track people's movements on a larger scale than previously known,” and the practice has continued under Biden due to a contract that didn't expire until 2021. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more.
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