{"id":219821,"date":"2026-01-12T12:57:39","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T17:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aclu.org\/?p=219821"},"modified":"2026-01-15T15:13:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T20:13:16","slug":"dhs-is-circumventing-constitution-by-buying-data-it-would-normally-need-a-warrant-to-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aclu.org\/news\/privacy-technology\/dhs-is-circumventing-constitution-by-buying-data-it-would-normally-need-a-warrant-to-access","title":{"rendered":"DHS is Circumventing Constitution by Buying Data It Would Normally Need a Warrant to Access"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[2414],"metadata":[],"class_list":["post-219821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-free-future"],"acf":{"header_layout":"standard","header_image":220636,"mobile_header_image":null,"description":"Self-serving legal justification for data purchases is among documents obtained via FOIA ","authors":[219823,217557],"components":[{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":{"text":"Subscribe to the Free Future Newsletter<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\r\nFree Future home<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nThe Fourth Amendment generally requires the government to get a warrant before searching your private information, but government agencies are circumventing the intent of the Constitution by simply buying sensitive, personal data from private companies. Today, the ACLU published documents<\/a> obtained from the Department of Homeland Security shedding light on how ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and other parts of DHS have bought access to huge amounts of highly sensitive location data harvested from people\u2019s cell phones that enables government tracking of our movements over time.\r\n\r\nWe filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DHS in 2020 for records about its practice of purchasing bulk access to cell phone location information gathered from smartphone apps. In 2022, we posted<\/a> thousands of pages of previously unreleased documents, but our litigation continued, and today we are publishing the additional records we\u2019ve obtained over the last several years. Although DHS announced in 2024 that it was ending its contracts with data brokers for access to bulk cell phone location data, recent reporting<\/a> indicates that the agency is getting back in the business of mass tracking of Americans\u2019 phones, giving these records renewed relevance.\r\n\r\nIn fact, just last week, 404 Media reported<\/a> that ICE bought access to a social media and phone surveillance system that is \u201cdesigned to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen we published the first set of records we obtained from DHS, we highlighted<\/a> some major revelations from the documents, including the huge volumes of location data at issue, how revealing that data can be about individuals\u2019 lives, and the self-serving attempts of government contractors and DHS itself to minimize the quite obvious privacy implications of this surveillance. The new batch of documents further underscores the privacy concerns and legal questions raised by this practice, and reinforces the pressing need for strong legal protection, like the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would end the government\u2019s pattern of circumventing constitutional protections by purchasing the data instead of obtaining a warrant from a judge.\r\n\r\nAmong the new documents is a two-page legal memo<\/a> from ICE, providing our most detailed look yet into the agency\u2019s attempt to craft a legal justification for purchasing access to highly sensitive location information without a warrant. The memo claims that the purchased location information is different from the cell phone location data at issue in Carpenter v. United States<\/i><\/a>, an ACLU case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the government needs a warrant to obtain cell phone location history directly from cellular service providers because of the \u201cprivacies of life\u201d those records can reveal. The ICE memo, which is heavily redacted, appears to attempt to distinguish the purchased location data from the cell phone location data at issue in Carpenter<\/i> on a ridiculous technicality: that this newer data is tied to phones\u2019 Mobile Advertising IDs (known as MAIDs or AdIDs) instead of to phone numbers or names. But that is a distinction without a difference.\r\n\r\nAdIDs are unique alphanumeric codes assigned to each device. Although some have described these identifiers as a way to target advertisements without identifying individuals, that promise of privacy is illusory. An entire industry now exists to \u201cenrich\u201d the AdID-linked location data with personal and historical information. The combined data reveals highly sensitive information about users\u2019 lifestyles, their routines, and the people they meet. And the companies selling this location data to the government know this\u2014they plainly say so in their marketing materials: \u201cWhat you do and where you do it defines who you are,\u201d according to a Gravy Analytics solicitation<\/a> that ICE received. Because our patterns of movement between home, work, school, and other frequently visited locations are unique, government agents can easily identify us by tracking our phones\u2014indeed, that\u2019s the entire point of this surveillance. Substituting AdIDs for phone numbers does little to prevent such tracking.\r\n\r\nSimilarly, nothing prevents federal agencies from identifying and linking this location information to PII they obtained separately. Indeed, the DHS Privacy Officer raised<\/a> this exact concern: \u201cCBP should address how AdIDs become linked to an individual during the CBP analysis process, as well as the retention of AdID in the vendor system and within CBP systems with the associated linked PII.\u201d In another document, Secret Service personnel also voiced<\/a> privacy concerns, pointing out that one of the cell phone location data tools might in fact contain PII.\r\n\r\nGovernment records illustrate how invasive the tracking can be:\r\n