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ACLU proceedings: DHS uses phone apps to track people in the US, Mexico, etc.
aaronheaton3 hours ago
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A report Published Monday by the ACLU, it details an extensive surveillance program under the Department of Land Security that can access billions of location points on hundreds of millions of personal mobile phones.
Programs that started under the Trump administration and continued under the Biden administration over $ 1 million First reported It was subsequently subject to an ongoing proceeding by the ACLU by The Wall Street Journal in 2020.
Thousands of pages of documentation were released on Monday, shedding new light on the program. Call ACLU “Darkness,” “massive privacy breaches,” and the government is trying to buy “how to circumvent the warrant requirements of Article 4 of the Constitutional Amendment.”
Billions of places, millions of smartphones
At the heart of the program are two data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street, and a document obtained by the ACLU claims that it can automatically compile 15 billion location points from more than 250 million mobile phones daily. I am.
By comparison, there are approximately 258 million adults in the United States. According to census data..
The email highlighted in the report suggests that the program is instructed to track “patterns of illegal immigrants,” but information about thousands and even millions of US citizens. Is also summarized.
In just three days, the US Customs and Border Protection alone collected data from more than 113,000 locations in the southwest without a warrant, reaching 26 data points per minute.
Documents obtained by the ACLU show a focused effort to monitor Southwestern cities, especially Phoenix and Los Angeles, but the organization is currently only available to a “small subset” (336,000 location points from 2018). It states that it is possible.
And in about 9,000 cities, from New York City to Menominee, Michigan, the program seems to be running nationwide.
Data from both Canada and Mexico were also collected. This includes the largest cities in the country, Toronto and Mexico City. Even location points from Amsterdam and Bucharest have appeared in thousands of pages of documentation.
What information is used?
According to the data Venntel documentationCan be used to “identify devices observed in places of interest”, “repeaters, identify frequent places, identify known peers, and discover patterns of life”.
Second, investigators within DHS (under the umbrella of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secret Service, and Coast Guard) have access to vast amounts of data at their disposal, so not only individuals, but individuals as well. It can be identified and tracked. Everyone in a particular area.
To avoid legal implications, both Venntel and Babel Street state that location information is “digital exhaust.” In a news release, ACLU said, “Despite the overall purpose of this data being to be able to identify and track people,” personal identification information because the data is a phone number rather than a person’s name. Claims not to have.
The two companies also state that users voluntarily share location data when they agree to the terms of use for various smartphone apps. This app often contains clauses that allow the sale of personal data. The ACLU states, “That consent is fiction.”
“Many mobile phone users are unaware of the number of apps that are collecting GPS information on their mobile phones and do not expect the data to be sold in large quantities to the government,” the organization said. I am saying.
The news is Georgetown Report In May, Immigration and Customs Enforcement used facial recognition technology to gather information about driver’s licenses, track driver movements in major US cities, and set millions of American utility records. Edited and said, “I’ve made it possible to submit detailed documents to almost everyone. Time.”
https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2022/7/19/23270019/aclu-report-dhs-using-phone-apps-to-track-people-in-us-mexico-ice-cbp-illegal-immigration ACLU proceedings: DHS uses phone apps to track people in the US, Mexico, etc.
