ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media.
The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice.
Surveillance contractors around the world create massive datasets of phones’, and by extension people’s movements, and then sell access to the data to government agencies. In turn, U.S. agencies have used these tools without a warrant or court order.
“The Biden Administration shut down DHS’s location data purchases after an inspector general found that DHS had broken the law. Every American should be concerned that Trump’s hand-picked security force is once again buying and using location data without a warrant,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.
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