DHS is Spying on U.S. Citizens
Our government seems to be abusing its power and violating our rights through any agency it can, using any excuse it can find.
On Monday, July 18, 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published thousands of documents that were obtained through an ongoing lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The documents pertain to a surveillance program in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other agencies within DHS have been collecting massive amounts of U.S. citizens’ cell phone data.
This program, which was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal in early 2020, began during the Trump administration and has continued under Biden. After the initial reporting, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and ended up suing the agencies involved later that year. The supposed purpose of the program is to track illegal immigration, but the implications of such massive data collection stretch much further than that. According to the Journal:
The Department of Homeland Security and its components acknowledged buying access to the data, but wouldn’t discuss details about how they are using it in law-enforcement operations. People familiar with some of the efforts say it is used to generate investigative leads about possible illegal border crossings and for detecting or tracking migrant groups.
Part of the rationale used by those who view this bulk data collection as legal is that people voluntarily allow certain apps to access their cell phone’s location. That data can be sold to marketing companies, data brokers, and advertisers who then use it to push targeted ads onto consumers, for example. This is how DHS was able to acquire the data which was used to spy on U.S. citizens.
“At the heart of the program are two data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street, which in documents obtained by the ACLU claimed to be able to automatically compile 15 billion location points from over 250 million cellphones every day,” reads an article from Deseret News that discusses the likelihood of people from my home state of Utah being among the hundreds of millions of Americans whose data was collected. “By comparison, there are roughly 258 million adults in the U.S., according to census data.”
The program mainly consists of tracking cities in the southwest United States but was not limited to one region. According to Deseret News: “Data from both Canada and Mexico was also collected, including Toronto and Mexico City, the largest cities in each country. Even location points from Amsterdam and Bucharest surfaced in the thousands of pages of documents.”
This isn’t the first time a government agency has been caught spying on U.S. citizens. Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk data collection of our emails and phone records nearly a decade ago, Wikileaks revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has the capability of spying on you through your smart TV back in 2017, and earlier this year a Georgetown University report showed that ICE has been using facial recognition technology and utility records to collect information on a majority of U.S. citizens. Clearly, our government has very little concern for our privacy or our Fourth Amendment rights.
DHS was able to work around the Fourth Amendment, which is supposed to protect us from unreasonable searches and seizures, by purchasing these data from private companies rather than obtaining a warrant and going through the proper legal channels. The claim is that since DHS is just another “commercial purchaser” and since these data don’t contain any “personally identifiable information” (PII), the government has free rein to obtain and use this information. All while using American tax dollars to pay for it, of course.
The data in question is considered “digital exhaust” because the location data is not linked to any specific cell phone numbers, but the amount of data collected is still expansive enough to discover a “pattern of life” according to documents obtained by the ACLU. This data does not need to have any PII in order to give the government a disconcerting amount of information about U.S. citizens, many of whom are not even suspected of a crime while they’re being spied on.
By exploiting this loophole, the Department of Homeland Security has been able to bypass any current legal precedent against such tactics. That precedent was set in Carpenter v. United States in 2018, in which the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement must acquire a warrant in order to access geolocation data from cell phones. However, that ruling didn’t address the legality of government agencies purchasing that data from private companies. According to the Wall Street Journal:
In 2018, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in the case Carpenter v. United States saying that geographic location data drawn from cellphones in the U.S. is a specially protected class of information because it reveals so much about Americans. The court put limits on law enforcement’s ability to obtain such data directly from cellphone companies without court supervision.
But the federal government has essentially found a workaround by purchasing location data used by marketing firms rather than going to court on a case-by-case basis. Because location data is available through numerous commercial ad exchanges, government lawyers have approved the programs and concluded that the Carpenter ruling doesn’t apply.
Last year a bipartisan group of senators, led by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), introduced a bill with the intention of closing this legal loophole. The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would essentially prevent government agencies from acquiring U.S. citizens’ information from data brokers without first obtaining probable cause orders. Passing this legislation, which has support from both Democrats and Republicans as well as many civil liberties groups, would be a great step toward restoring at least some semblance of our Fourth Amendment rights.
Another step we could take would be to fix our broken immigration system. If we simplified the process of entering the country legally then there would be less incentive for migrants to enter the country illegally. This would not only help those trying to build a life for themselves inside the U.S., but it would also prevent our government from cruelly detaining illegal immigrants in inhumane detention centers. And getting back to the matter at hand, less illegal immigration would mean CBP and ICE would have less of an excuse to spy on U.S. citizens in the name of protecting our borders.
Our government seems to be abusing its power and violating our rights through any agency it can, using any excuse it can find. This latest example is just one of many, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Politicians and bureaucrats will often try to convince us that we must relinquish some of our freedom in order for them to keep us safe. We should always reject this notion. In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Next time you download an app onto your phone, keep in mind that you may inadvertently be allowing the Department of Homeland Security to access your information. All in the name of keeping you safe, of course.
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