Documents show Homeland Security is tracking way more phone data than predicted.

By Ashley Belanger - 7/19/2022

Update: Venntel is a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics, which provided
comments from its Chief Privacy Officer and Vice President of Legal
Jason Sarfati. In a blog post, Sarfati responded to Politico's
reporting by requesting corrections of "material inaccuracies about
Venntel's data and business practice."

Sarfati makes two claims that contradict Politico's reporting. First,
he says that Venntel did not sign a new contract last winter that
extends through June 2023. "This is objectively false. Venntel does
not have any active contracts with DHS." Rather, the June 2023 date on
that contract was a "potential end date" that "marks the end of this
contract's potential period of performance or when the recipient will
finish its work if all remaining contract extension options are
exercised." In an email, a Gravy Analytics spokesperson confirmed that
this contract has closed and cannot be extended to the June 2023
potential end date.

Original story:

For years, people have wondered not if, but how much, the Department
of Homeland Security accesses mobile location data to monitor US
citizens. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union released
thousands of heavily redacted pages of documents that provide a
"glimpse" of how DHS agencies came to leverage "a shocking amount" of
location data, apparently purchasing data without following proper
protocols to ensure they had the authority to do so.

Documents were shared with the ACLU "over the course of the last year
through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit." Then Politico
got access and released a report confirming that DHS contracted with
two surveillance companies, Babel Street and Venntel, to scour
hundreds of millions of cell phones from 2017 to 2019 and access "more
than 336,000 location data points across North America." The
collection of emails, contracts, spreadsheets, and presentation slides
provide evidence that "the Trump administration's immigration
enforcers used mobile location data to track people's movements on a
larger scale than previously known," and the practice has continued
under Biden due to a contract that didn't expire until 2021.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/dhs-bought-shocking-amount-of-warrantless-phone-tracking-data-aclu-says/

***** Moderator's Note *****

My son was about ten when I first saw him using AOL Instant
Messenger. I didn't choose to censor it, but I warned him that he was
giving up something very important and very private: that he was
telling total strangers the names of his friends.

I doubt he understood what that meant, and I doubt even most adults
understand what it means today. AFAICT, America is turning inward, and
it will soon revert to a more vicious and more effective kind of
McCarthyism, when anyone who points out what they feel is wrong will
be targeted for "reeducation" and will be threatened with
guilt-by-association, using the location data from their cell phones,
if they don't bow down.

I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it.

Bill Horne
Moderator

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