The Feds Have Your Number… And Your Location… And a lot More

“A day-in-the-life profile of individuals based on mined social media data.”
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- Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, The New Republic

​You might think that where you go and with whom you meet is your private information. And it is. But now it’s also accessible to the government, with a federal agency purchasing software to track the location of your phone.

Joseph Cox of 404 Media reports that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is buying an “all-in-one” surveillance tool from Penlink to “compile, process, and validate billions of daily location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, providing both forensic and predictive analytics.”

That chilling quote is ICE’s own declaration. Apparently, acquiring Penlink’s proprietary tools are the only way to beat criminals at their own game.

ICE is not taking us down a slippery slope. It is going straight to the gully, discarding any concept of the prohibition against warrantless surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment. From there, monitoring the movements of the general population is simply an act of political will. As with facial recognition software, notes the Independent’s Sean O’Grady, it is one more example of the “creeping ubiquity of various types of surveillance.”

Indeed, location is but one element of commercial telemetry data (CTD), the industry term for information acquired from cellphone networks, connected vehicles, websites, and more. PPSA readers know that banning the sale of CTD to government agencies is one goal of the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which passed the House in the previous Congress.

Collecting and selling CTD is the shady business of the data broker industry, a practice the Federal Trade Commission once tried, meekly, to rein in. Indeed, for one brief shining moment, even ICE previously announced it would stop buying (but continue to use) CTD after the Department of Homeland Security’s own Inspector General found that DHS agencies weren’t giving privacy protections their due.

And yet here we are. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Beryl Lipton recently put it in Forbes:

“This extension and expansion of ICE’s Penlink contract underlines the federal government’s enthusiasm for indiscriminate and warrantless data collection on as many people as possible. We’re still learning about the extent of the government’s growing surveillance apparatus, but tools like Penlink can absolutely assist ICE in turning law-abiding citizens and protestors into targets of the federal government.”
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These tools are in the hands of ICE today, but they could be in the hands of the FBI, IRS, and other federal agencies in the blink of an eye. Congress should take note of this development when it debates reauthorization of a key surveillance authority – FISA Section 702 – next spring.

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