DHS Spent Millions of Tax Dollars on Cellphone Location Data, ACLU Says

The Homeland Security Department headquarters in northwest Washington. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars to purchase cellphone location data to track people’s movements, according to documents reviewed and released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

It’s no secret that some U.S. government agencies have been buying and using cellphone location data without warrants. In 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) paid for access to a commercial cellphone location database, presumably in hopes of locating and tracking illegal immigrants and suspected tax evaders. Earlier this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was found to have spent $420,000 on cellphone location data to analyze COVID-19 lockdown compliance and map patterns of people visiting schools and churches.

The new documents, obtained by the ACLU via an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, suggests that the DHS and its sub-agencies have utilized this information to track down people on a larger scale than previously known.

According to the ACLU, the 6,168 pages of location records, spanning from 2017 to 2019, contain approximately 336,000 location points extracted from cellphone apps. The civil rights organization said the DHS spent millions of dollars to purchase access to the bulk of these data from data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street.

Law enforcement agencies can use such data to “identify devices observed at places of interest” and “identify repeat visitors, frequented locations, pinpoint known associates, and discover pattern of life,” according to Venntel’s promotional material.

“The records, which the ACLU obtained over the course of the last year through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, shed new light on the government’s ability to obtain our most private information by simply opening the federal wallet,” the ACLU said in an article announcing the release.

The ACLU also said there is a particular privacy concerned for people living near the national border, alleging that the ICE’s attempt to use cellphone location to data identify patterns of illegal immigration could “indiscriminately sweep in information about people going about their daily lives in border communities.”

The DHS’s warrantless-buying of data violates the precedent established by Carpenter v. United States, according to the ACLU. In the 2018 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that government agencies must have a warrant to access someone’s cellphone location data, citing the “privacies of life” that such information may reveal.

The ACLU further argued that these documents are “proof” that Congress should pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, a bill put forth by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in 2021. Under the proposed bill, government agencies would have to first secure a court order before buying cellphone location data from data brokers.

The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

In September 2020, following the Wall Street Journal report, Wyden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for an internal audit of the IRS’s purchase of Venntel data. “The IRS is not above the law and the agency’s lawyers should never provide [IRS Criminal] investigators with permission to bypass the courts and engage in warrantless surveillance of Americans,” they wrote in a letter (pdf) to J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

In response, George told (pdf) the Democrats that the use of Venntel data was legally justified, although such information “did not produce useful results and wasn’t used as a significant tool” in the agencies’ criminal investigations.

“Data obtained from marketers of information like Venntel is not subject to a warrant because the data is collected by Apps loaded on cell phones to which the phone users voluntarily granted access,” the Inspector General wrote.