dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BUYS OUR CELL PHONE LOCATION DATAPART V

Published: June 14, 2022

SOURCE: ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION

HOW IS LOCATION DATA USED?

While several contracts between data brokers and federal agencies are public records, very little is known about how those agencies actually use the services. Information has trickled out through government documents and anonymous sources.

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

Perhaps the most prominent federal buyer of bulk location data is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as its subsidiaries, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). The Wall Street Journal reported that ICE used the data to help identify immigrants who were later arrested. CBP uses the information to “look for cellphone activity in unusual places,” including unpopulated portions of the US-Mexico border. According to the report, government documents explicitly reference the use of location data to discover tunnels along the border. Motherboard reported that CBP purchases location data about people all around the United States, not just near the border. It conducts those searches without a court order, and it has refused to share its legal analysis of the practice with Congress.

The Federal Procurement Database shows that, in total, DHS has paid at least $2 million for location data products from Venntel. Recently released procurement records from DHS shed more light on one agency’s practice. The records relate to a series of contracts between Venntel and a recently-shuttered research division of DHS, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA). In 2018, the agency paid $100,000 for five licenses to the Venntel Portal. A few months later, HSARPA upgraded to a product called “Geographic Marketing Data - Western Hemisphere,” forking over $650,000 for a year of access. This data was “delivered on a daily basis via S3 bucket”—that is, shipped directly to DHS in bulk. From context, it seems like the “Venntel Portal” product granted limited access to data hosted by Venntel, while the purchase of “Geographic Marketing Data” gave DHS direct access to all of Venntel’s data for particular regions in near-real-time.

The HSARPA purchases were made as part of a program called the Data Analytics Engine (DA-E). In a Statement of Work, DHS explained that it needed data specifically for Central America and Mexico in order to support the project. Elsewhere, the government has boasted that ICE has used “big data architecture” from DA-E to generate “arrests, seizures, and new leads.” ICE has maintained an ongoing relationship with Venntel in the years since, signing at least six contracts with the company since 2018.

FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT

The FBI released its own contracts with Venntel in late 2021. The documents show that the FBI paid $22,000 for a single license to the Venntel Portal, but are otherwise heavily redacted. Another part of the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), committed $25,000 for a one-year license in early 2018, but Motherboard reported that the agency terminated its contract before the first month was up. According to the Wall Street Journal, the IRS tried to use Venntel’s data to track individual suspects, but gave up when it couldn’t locate its targets in the company’s dataset. Some of Babel Street’s law enforcement customers have had more success: Protocol reported that the U.S. Secret Service used Locate X to seize illegal credit card skimmers installed at gas pumps in 2018.

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/82756/how-the-federal-government-buys-our-cell-phone-location.html