Byron Tau and Michelle Hackman at the Wall Street Journal: “The Trump administration has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The location data is drawn from ordinary cellphone apps, including those for games, weather and e-commerce, for which the user has granted permission to log the phone’s location.
The Department of Homeland Security has used the information to detect undocumented immigrants and others who may be entering the U.S. unlawfully, according to these people and documents.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of DHS, has used the data to help identify immigrants who were later arrested, these people said. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, another agency under DHS, uses the information to look for cellphone activity in unusual places, such as remote stretches of desert that straddle the Mexican border, the people said.
The federal government’s use of such data for law enforcement purposes hasn’t previously been reported.
Experts say the information amounts to one of the largest known troves of bulk data being deployed by law enforcement in the U.S.—and that the use appears to be on firm legal footing because the government buys access to it from a commercial vendor, just as a private company could, though its use hasn’t been tested in court.
“This is a classic situation where creeping commercial surveillance in the private sector is now bleeding directly over into government,” said Alan Butler, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a think tank that pushes for stronger privacy laws.
According to federal spending contracts, a division of DHS that creates experimental products began buying location data in 2017 from Venntel Inc. of Herndon, Va., a small company that shares several executives and patents with Gravy Analytics, a major player in the mobile-advertising world.
In 2018, ICE bought $190,000 worth of Venntel licenses. Last September, CBP bought $1.1 million in licenses for three kinds of software, including Venntel subscriptions for location data.
The Department of Homeland Security and its components acknowledged buying access to the data, but wouldn’t discuss details about how they are using it in law-enforcement operations. People familiar with some of the efforts say it is used to generate investigative leads about possible illegal border crossings and for detecting or tracking migrant groups.
CBP has said it has privacy protections and limits on how it uses the location information. The agency says that it accesses only a small amount of the location data and that the data it does use is anonymized to protect the privacy of Americans….(More)”