US Government Buying Data From Private Firms to Spy on Americans, Reports Reveal

US law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly seeking and gaining access to US citizens’ private movements, at times without search warrants, via third-party tracking tools, warns Just the News, particularly citing the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) findings.

A trove of records revealed through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have indicated that local and state US police departments, as well as federal entities, are buying a cellphone tracking tool in order to monitor people's movements.

"Reporting and a recent investigation by EFF confirms that law enforcement across the country is regularly getting access to our private movements — with the ability to retrace our daily lives — often without a warrant," Aaron Mackey, senior staff attorney for EEF, told Just the News.

According to Mackey, "this is an end-run around the Fourth Amendment and permits broad surveillance that can sweep up anyone who happens to be near the scene of a crime."

The Fog Reveal app, a product of the Fog Data Science company, can track people's movements going back months in time, thus making it possible to learn where people work, live, and associate. The company reportedly possesses hundreds of billions of records from a whopping 250 million mobile devices and uses data to create location analyses.

The controversial tool came into the spotlight in early September with Associated Press disclosing that Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in various criminal investigations and was also instrumentalized to trace the movements of a potential participant in the January 6 protests at Capitol Hill.

"The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used." AP wrote.

Judging from the documents examined by EFF, Fog Data Science has past or ongoing contractual relationships with at least 18 local, state, and federal law enforcement clients.

Fog Reveal is not the only tool exploited by US law enforcement agencies, according to Just the News. State police departments, federal agencies and the US military are working with numerous third-party data brokers which harvest consumers' location data from application developers.

"Specifically, various smartphone apps request location access in order to enable certain features," the media outlet explained. "Once a person grants that access, the app is able to share it with other parties. Data brokers strike deals with the app developers — or with other data brokers — through various arrangements to obtain the information and sell it."

Last week, Vice reported that the US military had bought access to the Augury platform, an internet monitoring tool that reportedly covers over 90% of the world’s internet traffic. The US Navy, Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency have collectively paid at least $3.5 million to access the tool.

Likewise, in November 2020, Motherboard found that US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had bought access to a Locate X tool that uses location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples' phones. The tool allows users to search by a specific area and pinpoint mobile devices which were there at a particular point in time going back months. It turned out in March 2021 that a division of the Iowa Air National Guard was using the same tool.

Meanwhile, according to a July 2022 report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the DHS has spent millions of dollars over the recent years to purchase cellphone location data from two companies to track the movements of both US and foreigner citizens both inside and outside the US. According to the ACLU, this information was acquired without warrants.

For its part, the FBI maintains cooperation with Venntel, a company which gathers information through a complex supply chain of advertising firms, data resellers, and "innocuous-looking apps" installed on peoples' phones around the world, according to Vice. Last year, the bureau made its contracts with Venntel public. However, the documents were heavily redacted. Venntel also sells sensitive location data to other US law enforcement agencies including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Civil rights groups argue that the disturbing trend is violating the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. The Fourth Amendment specifically guarantees that people will not be subject to surveillance without a court decision. In addition, the Supreme Court held in 2018 that the Constitution requires the government to get a warrant to compel phone companies to provide location data about their customers. This ruling is also known as "the Carpenter decision".

"Law enforcement's exploitation of our private digital data is dangerous and unconstitutional," EFF's Mackey told Just the News. "This harmful surveillance is only possible because there is no federal law that ensures that everyone can control their private data. Its past time Congress acted to protect our private information from both private and government surveillance."