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President Donald Trump's government has purchased a new tool that allows federal agents the ability to monitor the phones and social media of a neighborhood or city block without a warrant.
404 Media reported Thursday that it had materials showing ICE recently purchased two surveillance systems: Tangles and Webloc. The latter tracks phones without a warrant and connects the federal agents to the owners' homes or employers. Tangles alone cost $2 million when ICE first purchased it in September, said a Forbes report. In December, however, ICE spent another $312,500 to the company for more licenses.
A company named Penlink acquired commercial location data from millions of phones, all without warrants, and 404 Media said it's setting off alarm bells with civil liberties experts.
“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, when speaking to 404 Media.
On Wednesday, one of the 2,000 federal agents sent to Minneapolis shot and killed a 37-year-old mom while she was trying to move her car.
Webloc users can search a database of cell phone information using a "single perimeter analysis." It searches a given area for phones for a certain period of time. An agent can draw a target area and then select the maximum number of results.
"Once a Webloc user has identified a device of interest, they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner, by seeing where else it has travelled both locally and across the country," 404 Media explained. "Users can click a route feature which shows the path the device took. The material suggests that if users look at where the device was located at night, they might find the person’s possible home, and during the day, the person’s possible employer."
Details include the kind of phone it is, the days the device was at a given location, the amount of time at that location and the total number of location data for the phone, the report continued.
The tool uses "small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs" to gather the information. Those kit owners then pay app developers to hand over location data. Another way is through advertising tools in which a company can pay to get its ads on phones for a certain demographic. The targeting data includes GPS coordinates. The report noted that the "real-time bidding" information for ads have been used by spying firms in the past. Apps like Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal and even prayer apps are among those cooperating with such spying firms, a previous report from 404 Media revealed.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has a history of investigating the location data industry. Speaking to 404 Media, Wyden said, “Under Trump, ICE has terrorized American cities with zero regard for due process or the wishes of the people who live there. In the hands of Trump’s shock troops, location data could do tremendous harm to people who have done nothing wrong.”
The ACLU obtained a copy of a document through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that showed ICE's legal justification for not seeking warrants is that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Americans have "no reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties."
They say users of the apps could remove the app that's gathering the data or turn off location services on their phone. 404 Media said that in their investigations apps don't always tell users "how their location data might be used or sold, and in some cases apps still collected data even when people opted-out, meaning users could not have meaningfully consented."