Several tech media on Monday reported information released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on the extent to which government agencies collect smartphone location data.
The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is behind this location tracking.
As a reminder, the DHS was created after the September 11 attacks by President George W. Bush to coordinate homeland security efforts. The Bureau coordinates the executive branch's efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks in the United States. DHS is the most diverse amalgamation of federal functions and responsibilities, integrating 22 government agencies into a single organization, reads the DHS page on Wikipedia.
US government agencies were known to collect and track the location data of millions of smartphone users to some extent to hunt down immigrants and suspected tax evaders.
With new documents released by the ACLU as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, we learn the extent of warrantless data collection. Of more than 6,000 documents reviewed by the ACLU, an estimated nearly 336k location points across North America were obtained from people's phones by two border organizations; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Much of this location data was obtained by CBP through a data broker, Venntel, which collects and sells information from smartphones.
By buying this data from brokers like Venntel, officials circumvent the legal procedures that should have been applied to access data from citizens' smartphones.
In the documents obtained, this data would be “opt-in”, that is to say voluntarily shared by users. Willingly or not, location data like GPS information is widely shared with the government as soon as it comes out of smartphones.
According to the ACLU, these documents are further evidence that Congress must pass the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, proposed by Senators Ron Wyden (Democrat - Oregon) and Rand Paul (Republican - Kentucky), which would require the government to obtain a court order before obtaining Americans' data, such as location information from our smartphones, from data brokers.
If you do not take such an intrusion into the lives of Americans seriously, read this recommendation from our own government on its travel.gc.ca site before crossing the American border, under Electronic Devices.
