Our lawsuit revealed the records to prove it. Here's your rundown.

ACLU Supporter –

Government agencies – including ICE, CBP, and other parts of the DHS – are bypassing the Fourth Amendment to buy our most private information with federal funds. And the ACLU has the records to prove it.

Here's a quick rundown of these alarming new findings – which you can also read in full today: <[link removed]>

First, some background: ICE's and CBP's warrantless purchases to access people's sensitive location information were first reported in early 2020. After the news broke, we submitted a FOIA request to DHS, ICE, and CBP – and sued to force the agencies to respond. Our litigation is still ongoing, but we're 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.

What those records reveal is a massive privacy invasion by our government: We released thousands of pages of previously unpublished documents that detail millions of taxpayer dollars being used by DHS to buy access to cell phone location information – aggregated and sold by two shadowy data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street. The records expose the companies' and the government's blatant attempts to rationalize this unfettered sale of mass data being quietly extracted from smartphone apps – to get around both the Fourth Amendment and a Supreme Court precedent that protects similar cell phone location data against warrantless government access.

The volume and detail of people's sensitive location information obtained by DHS is staggering. Documents from one of the companies marketing the bulk location data to DHS brag about adding 15 billion location points from more than 250 million phones and other devices to its searchable database every day. CBP also turned over seven redacted spreadsheets of location data it had paid for – a small subset of what's in Venntel's database. Across 6,168 pages of location records, were approximately 336,000 location points obtained from people's phones. With this massive trove of location information, government investigators can identify and track specific individuals or everyone in a particular area – giving them the power to know intimate details of our private activities and associations.

These documents are particularly concerning for the privacy rights of people living near our nation's borders: A 2018 DHS internal document proposed using the location data to identify patterns of illegal immigration – threatening to indiscriminately sweep in information about people going about their daily lives in border communities.

ACLU Supporter, you can learn more fully of what these records reveal in this in-depth investigation <[link removed]> – and when you do, know that it's just the tip of the iceberg.

DHS still owes us more documents, and yet it's already abundantly clear that law enforcement's practice of buying its way around the core protections of the Fourth Amendment must stop.

That's why we're giving you this news immediately and ending on one final point: As distressing as this information is, there's legislation that could put this government practice to an end. It's called the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act – and in the coming days we'll send details on how to take action to support it.

So be ready for what's next and, in the meantime, thanks for staying informed and staying in the fight.

More soon,

Nathan Freed Wessler
Pronouns: He, him, his
Deputy Director of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, ACLU

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