Immigration and customs enforcement is reportedly looking for access to a powerful series of very controversial supervisory instruments with which the agency can check the locations of people based on data of hundreds of millions of mobile phones.
The relocation, after immigration agencies have reduced the use of such data under the BIDEN administration, has alerted the proponents of privacy.
Don Bell, policy advisor at the Constitution Project in the project on government substances, an interest group, warned that the Ice Supervision Instruments could have the privacy protection of the warrant process and the fourth amendment circumvented.
“This is probably unconstitutional,” Bell said The independent. “Usually, if law enforcement wants to take your phone and are interested in obtaining your location data, they would need an order, but because the law did not keep up with technology, there is a Maas in the law that has effectively allowed law enforcement to buy location data, which is very sensitive, without first receiving a command.”
In an edited acquisition document obtained by the technical news site 404 mediaThe Immigration Office proposes to enter into a contract to buy “all-in-one” tools from a company called Penlink with which agents can compile, process and validate billions of daily location signals of hundreds of millions of mobile devices. “The document also states payments for services related to ‘Face Detection’, ‘Advanced facial assignments’ and a ‘dark web data feed’.
“The BIDEN administration closed the purchases of location data from DHS after an inspector general has established that DHS had violated the law,” Senator Ron Wyden told The Outlet. “Every American should worry that Trumps are hand -picked security power to buy and use location data without an order.”
The independent has contacted ICE and Penlink for comment.
One of the products, Tangles, “automatically records historical data from multiple communication channels, mobile forensic research, internet -based communication, location data, financial data and web information,” says Purchasing records obtained by Forbes.
The company that was originally founded Tangles, COBwebs, was founded by a former member of the Israeli Elite Cyberinformation agencies, and that was Reportedly Meta thrown in 2021 after it was reportedly found using Facebook and WhatsApp accounts to sniff on activists and opposition politicians in Hong Kong and Mexico. The company later merged with Penlink in 2023.
The ICE documents also describe the agency that tested a tool with the name Vennentel, whose makers the Federal Trade Commission in 2024 Accused of “illegal tracking and sales” -sensitive location dataIncluding information about visiting mobile users to health -related locations and worship places.
The reported purchase of ICE of these powerful tools reverses the trend of the BIDEN administration when the purchase of massive amounts of consumer data for supervision of enforcement by the Enforcement Act was investigated under the investigation.
A report from 2023 from the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General showed that ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and DHS did not follow the internal privacy guidelines and federal legislation when using such location data.
That same year, CBP said It would stop using commercially produced smartphone data and ice cream did the same At the beginning of 2024. By April of that year, the House of Representatives assumed that the fourth amendment is not for sale, would do so forbid the government By buying the data from Americans from data brokers, they would otherwise need an order to obtain it.
That momentum has been reversed under the second Trump government, which has insisted on obtaining huge new surveillance areas as part of the general mass deportation campaign and infusion of unprecedented financing in the enforcement of federal immigration.
The Trump administration has reportedly restarted a $ 2 million contract with Paragon Solutions (US) Inc., a Spyware company founded in Israel, whose products have been accused of facilitating the supervision of journalists and activists. The deal was previously frozen to judge if he kept it An Executive Order of March 2023 Biden Administration The use of the use of commercial spyware that could yield against the US can be used by the use of counter -in -lights or that are used incorrectly by a foreign government, Waded reported.
Paragon’s “zero click” graphic program can quietly invade the mobile phone from his goal and extract its content, even from coded apps.
Under Trump, ICE has also concluded agreements with colleague agencies to access very sensitive data, including the Internal Revenue Service And Medicaid.
Bell, the public prosecutor of the Constitution Project, warned that the combination of recent jumps in computer and AI power, the massive expansion of ICE of supervision and data access and the willingness of the Trump administration to burn ideological opponents and protesters, because inland fear of federal action could be randomly and integrated from Federale.
“This seems to be part of a much larger ice pattern that tries to collect everything and everything,” he said. “Even if that means to pick up information about Americans, which is different from their alleged goal, and it is all the more over and made more dangerous because it seems as if this administration also defines what it means to be in opposition.”
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