ACLU FOIA Lawsuit: Department of Homeland Security Collects 15 Billion Cellphone Locations Every Day

​The American Civil Liberties Union performed an invaluable service for the American people today by releasing records from Department of Homeland Security agencies that demonstrate the sweep of the government’s routine violation of the Fourth Amendment  by purchasing Americans’ personal data from data brokers.
 
The ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DHS agencies includes Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. Coast Guard. This lawsuit is ongoing, but these first disclosures are eyepopping.
 
The ACLU lawsuit reveals:

• Your own tax dollars are being used to expose your privacy. DHS spends millions of taxpayer dollars to buy access to cellphone location information being aggregated and sold by two “shadowy data brokers,” Venntel and Babel Street.

 

• There is some internal angst in the agencies over the legitimacy of what they are doing. One DHS employee wrote that “[l]egal, policy, and privacy reviews have not always kept pace with the new and evolving technologies.”

 

• The government entertains specious legal theories justifying this raid on cellphone location data. It maintains that everyone with a cellphone relinquishes privacy voluntarily. ACLU’s response is “that consent is fiction: Many cellphone users don’t realize that many apps on their phones are collecting GPS information, and certainly don’t expect that data to be sold to the government in bulk.”

 

• The government is after our “patterns of life.” Documents characterize cellphone location information as “digital exhaust” with no personally identifying information. Yet these documents also say that through purchased data, law enforcement can “identify repeat visitors, frequented locations, pinpoint known associates, and discover pattern of life.”

 

• The project to pinpoint Americans’ location is on an astronomical scale. One data broker, Venntel, sent marketing materials to DHS claiming to collect 15 billion location points from over 250 million cellphones and other mobile devices every day.

 
“ACLU’s findings should concern every American with a cellphone,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chair of the House Judiciary Committee and now Senior Policy Advisor to PPSA. “ACLU’s determined effort to expose the scale of government intrusion into our privacy is a monumental public service. With the House and Senate now holding hearings into these practices, Congress has every reason to require warrants to intrude into our digital lives by passing the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act.”
 
Bob Goodlatte will testify on the government’s practice of buying Americans’ personal data tomorrow before the House Judiciary Committee.