Records Reveal the Scale of Homeland Security’s Phone Location Data Purchases…

by J Fingas at Engadget

Investigators raised alarm bells when they learned Homeland Security bureaus were buying phone location data to effectively bypass the Fourth Amendment requirement for a search warrant, and now it’s clearer just how extensive those purchases were. TechCrunch notes the American Civil Liberties Union has obtained records linking Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other DHS divisions to purchases of roughly 336,000 phone location points from the data broker Venntel. The info represents just a “small subset” of raw data from the southwestern US, and includes a burst of 113,654 points collected over just three days in 2018.

The dataset, delivered through a Freedom of Information Act request…