US law enforcement purchases data from third party firm to spy on Americans: Report

"Millions of Americans’ everyday movements can be traced by police with the click of a mouse and possibly without a warrant," Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco revealed in its explosive investigation.  US law enforcement agencies have been increasingly using third-party tracking tools to spy on the location of Americans to tap into their personal data without their consent or knowledge, the digital rights group claims.

EFF accessed a trove of records legally under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and found the US law enforcement authorities conducting mass surveillance on Americans via a data broker that’s selling their phone's geolocation data. The investigation, conducted by a team of EFF experts led by Staff Technologist Bennett Cyphers, found Virginia-based Fog Data Science [LCC] selling a service that allows the American police to see where a person was at any point in time over the past several years.

This surveillance not only includes possible crime scenes, but also homes, churches, workplaces, health clinics, or anywhere else including personal activities, according to EEF. Local and state police departments, as well as federal entities, have been buying this cellphone tracking tool in order to monitor the movements of people in real-time.

Credit: AP

First, the firm collects personal location data which is gathered via thousands of apps that people use on Android and iOS phones. It is then bought by data brokers who resell it to Fog Data Science, and many other firms involved in surveillance. Data brokers sell geolocation data to a large number of federal law enforcement agencies, but mainly the United States Police Deaprtments. 

“This data could be used to search for and identify everyone who visited a Planned Parenthood on a specific day, or everyone who attended a protest against police violence,” Cyphers said. 

“Fog already has extensively traced innocent people’s movements just to close its sales pitches, and local police have cast wide nets for minor crimes. The potential for abuse is staggering, and from what we’ve found so far, there are few or no rules protecting our constitutional rights.”

So how exactly third party surveillance firm Fog Data Science operate?

Fog Data Science compiles the raw geolocation data originally collected by applications unsuspecting people use every day on their smartphones and tablets. These applications gather location data about where your phone is at any given moment and then sell it to data brokers, who in turn sell it most often to advertisers or marketers who serve you ads based on your location. Fog then purchases “billions of data points” from some “250 million devices” around the United States, which is originally sourced from “tens of thousands” of mobile apps, the EFF established in its investigation. 

The police can then use the purchased Fog maps identifiers that represent every device within that geographical area at a given time frame. They also have the access to the device’s ID to trace that device’s precise location history over months or even several years. Fog does not require police officers to obtain a warrant or other court order before acquiring this location data. This is unlike communication service companies that hold their customers’ location data and generally do require a court order, according to EFF. 

This, according to the EFF investigation, implies that police without a warrant is tracking the precise movements of hundreds of millions of Americans in mass surveillance with no judicial oversight.

Law enforcement agencies can buy data in less than $10,000 per year

Aaron Mackey, senior staff attorney for EFF noted, that the recent investigation confirms that law enforcement across the US is regularly getting access to citizens' private movements — with the ability to retrace their daily lives and chores — often without a warrant. The data is also sold to the state highway patrols, local police departments, and county sheriffs.  Fog Data Science, he reminds, has “billions” of data points across millions of cellphone devices, and its high-profile data can be used to learn where targets work, live, and associate–in police lingo, a "pattern of life." Agencies can buy in for less than $10,000 per year. 

State police in Maryland, Indiana, and New Jersey, the highway patrols in California and Missouri, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation were found to have contracts with Fog for less than one year. Police in the New York City, Houston, and the Broward County, FL Sheriff’s Office also bought access to Fog’s services. Some other customers of the third-party surveillance firm include police in Lawrence, KS (population 97,000) and the sheriff of Washington County, OH (population 60,000).

EFF accessed more than 100 public records pertaining to government ties with location data brokers that uncovered this widely-used mass surveillance technology. The third-party firm was found to have ties with at least 18 local, state, and federal law enforcement clients, as well as some "free trials" clients. Some of the records obtained by the agency show that the police didn’t believe surveillance implicated the citizens' Fourth Amendment rights, and therefore, no warrant was sought. 

In November 2020, Motherboard similarly found that US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) purchased Locate X tool that used location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on citizens' smartphones. US military had bought access to the Augury platform, an internet monitoring tool that conducts surveillance on 90% of the world’s internet traffic. US Navy, Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency collectively paid at least $3.5 million to access the tool.