The civil liberties group released documents showing new details about how agencies had purchased information on people’s movements throughout North America.
The Trump administration’s immigration enforcers used mobile location data to track people’s movements on a larger scale than previously known, according to documents that raise new questions about federal agencies’ efforts to get around restrictions on warrantless searches.
The data, harvested from apps on hundreds of millions of phones, allowed the Department of Homeland Security to obtain data on more than 336,000 location data points across North America, the documents show.
These data points came from all over the continent, including in major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Denver, Toronto and Mexico City. This location data use has continued into the Biden administration, as Customs and Border Protection renewed a contract for $20,000 into September 2021, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed another contract in November 2021 that lasts until June 2023.
The American Civil Liberties Union obtained the records from DHS through a lawsuit it filed in 2020. It provided the documents to POLITICO and separately released them to the public on Monday.
The documents highlight conversations and contracts between federal agencies and the surveillance companies Babel Street and Venntel. They also show agency staff having internal conversations about privacy concerns on using phone location data.
In just three days in 2018, the documents show that the CBP collected data from more than 113,000 locations from phones in the Southwestern United States — equivalent to more than 26 data points per minute — without obtaining a warrant.
The documents highlight the massive scale of location data that government agencies including CBP and ICE received, and how the agencies sought to take advantage of the mobile advertising industry’s treasure trove of data.
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DHS used phone data to track people’s movements on a larger scale than was known, according to records released by the ACLU.
Over three days in 2018, the CBP got data from over 113,000 locations from phones in the Southwest U.S. without a warrant. https://t.co/8hGuSVzv77
— POLITICO (@politico) July 18, 2022
Many states that have criminalized abortion have also relied more on location data in recent years to probe crimes like robbery and sexual assault, a POLITICO analysis found https://t.co/UcEH7duMi7
— POLITICO (@politico) July 18, 2022
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