 PPSA has long warned that allowing federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to purchase Americans’ personal digital data from data brokers would build a surveillance state. Now the federal government has put in place the most effective tools to activate that surveillance state in America. This is the natural consequence of two technologies purchased by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Whether you believe ICE’s approach to mass deportations is necessary, or an exercise in cruelty, there is no question that what ICE is doing with technology is guaranteed to transform the whole balance between the federal government and its citizenry. It is deploying two forms of surveillance without a warrant that can track people to meetings with friends, their place of work, and homes, their houses of worship, while also drawing on data gleaned from social media to compile dossiers on Americans’ beliefs and personal associations. In using these technologies, ICE often doesn’t know if the target is an American citizen or someone who is not lawfully in this country. Joseph Cox of 404 Media, in his most recent blockbuster revelation, details the consequences of two technologies purchased from a company called Penlink. One such technology is Webloc, which allows ICE to draw a rectangle, circle, or polygon around a portion of a city and pick out smartphones of interest. Cox writes that “they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner by seeing where else it has traveled both locally and across the country. Users can click a route feature which shows the path the device took.” Webloc’s surveillance relies on exploiting code in ordinary apps on our phones, like games and weather apps, that track our location. The rest comes from data brokers that sell our private information through real-time bidding. In the digital age, we are all standing on the digital auction block. Another Penlink technology, called Tangles, is a social media monitoring product that can take an image of a person’s face on the street, identify that person, locate that person’s social media feeds, and produce a “sentiment analysis” from that target’s posts. At a glance, the government will have a file on your beliefs. These new government capabilities should worry conservatives, libertarians, and MAGA supporters, as well as liberals and progressives. The effectiveness of such technologies makes it inevitable that it will spread beyond ICE to the FBI, IRS, and other agencies, as the government works to break down the traditional data silos between agencies. They are sure to be used against Americans by administrations of both parties. Webloc and Tangles cost only a few million dollars – a rounding error for the federal government. As these capabilities expand and become daily practice, the constitutional balance of government by the consent of the governed – based on the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a probable cause warrant – will inevitably give way to authoritarian control. Only Congress can stop this. As the surveillance debate heats up ahead of the reauthorization of FISA Section 702 in April, Congress must urgently use that debate to pass a bill or an amendment that will restrict the currently unrestricted purchasing of Americans’ data by the government. As an old Kenny Loggins rock song put it, “make no mistake where you are, your back’s to the corner … stand up and fight.” Let Congress know it is not acceptable for federal agencies to buy our private and sensitive data without a warrant. Comments are closed.
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