Five Democratic senators have sent a letter to Joseph Cuffari, the DHS inspector general, asking him to investigate the CBP’s use of cellphone data collected by Virginia-based data broker and software company Venntel Inc. to illegally surveil Americans.
In the letter, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Edward Markey (D-MA) argue that the surveillance exceeds that permitted by the US Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States. In that decision, the court ruled that police require a warrant in order to access cellphone location data from a cellphone company, according to the blog Lawfare.
“CBP officials confirmed to Senate staff that the agency is using Venntel’s location database to search for information collected from phones in the United States without any kind of court order,” the senators note. “The agency refused a follow-up request for information about the legal analysis it conducted, and refused to reveal whether or not it has taken the position that the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision does not apply to location data purchased by the government.”
“CBP outrageously asserted that its legal analysis is privileged and therefore does not have to be shared with Congress. We disagree,” the congressional lawmakers wrote. “CBP is not above the law and it should not be able to buy its way around the fourth amendment.”
Mana Azarmi, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Nextgov on Monday, “If government agencies like CBP can evade the warrant requirements imposed by Carpenter simply by purchasing the data, we render that ruling a nullity, and then we lack sufficient checks to protect our privacy.”
CBP told the outlet, “All CBP operations in which commercially available telemetry data may be used are undertaken in furtherance of CBP’s responsibility to enforce US law at the border and in accordance with relevant legal, policy, and privacy requirements.”
According to Vice, Venntel sources its data from a collection of apps on users’ cellphones, including weather, games, e-commerce and others, which collect information about user location, including which cell tower their phone is using at that time. While Venntel says its data is anonymized by the company assigning it a random designation, the New York Times has demonstrated how even anonymized data can be used to triangulate someone’s identity based on daily life patterns.
In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that CBP and another DHS agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), had used the database to track down undocumented immigrants for several years. Contractual evidence from 2018 points to ICE buying $190,000 in Venntel licenses in 2018 and spending a collective $1.1 million in 2019 for three kinds of software, one of which was Venntel’s.
The Intercept revealed in June that in the weeks after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that sparked nationwide protests against police violence and white supremacy, the FBI updated its own contract with Venntel and penned an expedited deal with Dataminr, a company that strip-mines social media networks for desired information. Dataminr is described as an “official partner” of Twitter, and The Intercept also revealed how the firm helped police target communities of color amid the protests.
