60 per person per day, in the article, its docs may offer other rates,
hardly matters, cellco's have plenty more they give away top-secret,
FISA was never really stopped, just transfigured.
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/new-records-detail-dhs-purchase-and-use-of-vast-quantities-of-cell-phone-location-data
https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-department-homeland-security-commercial-location-data-foia
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0182-10fd-d06c-afbb-95fdce93
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0182-10ff-d914-a1af-78ff7081
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF17/20220623/114958/BILLS-117-8152-P34-Amdt-1.pdf
https://legislation.politicopro.com/bill/US_117_HR_8152
https://legislation.politicopro.com/bill/US_117_S_1265
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/homeland-security-cell-phone-tracking/
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibillion-dollar-market-for-your-phones-location-data
https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-agencies-use-cellphone-location-data-for-immigration-enforcement-11581078600
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/the-u-s-government-is-secretly-using-cell-phone-location-data-to-track-us-were-suing
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/22/supreme-court-warrants-cell-phone-location-664484
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/ice-dhs-cell-phone-data-tracking-geolocation
New Records Detail DHS Purchase and Use of Vast Quantities of Cell
Phone Location Data
Thousands of previously unreleased records illustrate how government
agencies sidestep our Fourth Amendment rights.
A photo of three cell phone towers in front of a sunset.
July 18, 2022
Shreya Tewari, Brennan Fellow, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project
Fikayo Walter-Johnson, Paralegal, ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and
Technology Project
Today, the ACLU published thousands of pages of previously unreleased
records about how Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, and other parts of the Department of Homeland
Security are sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against
unreasonable government searches and seizures by buying access to, and
using, huge volumes of people’s cell phone location information
quietly extracted from smartphone apps.
The records, which the ACLU obtained over the course of the last year
through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, shed new light on
the government’s ability to obtain our most private information by
simply opening the federal wallet. These documents are further proof
that Congress needs to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act,
which would end law enforcement agencies’ practice of buying their way
around the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.
ICE’s and CBP’s warrantless purchase of access to people’s sensitive
location information was first reported by The Wall Street Journal in
early 2020. After the news broke, we submitted a FOIA request to DHS,
ICE, and CBP, and we sued to force the agencies to respond to the
request in December 2020. Although the litigation is ongoing, we are
now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service,
the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have
provided us to date.
The released records shine a light on the millions of taxpayer dollars
DHS used to buy access to cell phone location information being
aggregated and sold by two shadowy data brokers, Venntel and Babel
Street. The documents expose those companies’ — and the government’s —
attempts to rationalize this unfettered sale of massive quantities of
data in the face of U.S. Supreme Court precedent protecting similar
cell phone location data against warrantless government access.
Four years ago, in Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled
that the government needs a warrant to access a person’s cellphone
location history from cellular service providers because of the
“privacies of life” those records can reveal. That case hinged on a
request for one suspect’s historical location information over a
several-month period. In the documents we received over the past year,
we found Venntel marketing materials sent to DHS explaining how the
company collects more than 15 billion location points from over 250
million cell phones and other mobile devices every day.
With this data, law enforcement can “identify devices observed at
places of interest,” and “identify repeat visitors, frequented
locations, pinpoint known associates, and discover pattern of life,”
according to a Venntel marketing brochure. The documents belabor how
precise and illuminating this data is, allowing “pattern of life
analysis to identify persons of interest.” By searching through this
massive trove of location information at their whim, government
investigators can identify and track specific individuals or everyone
in a particular area, learning details of our private activities and
associations.
The government should not be allowed to purchase its way around
bedrock
