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A dinner party tip on bought phone data
Byron Tau, a Washington reporter who had covered courts and knew how law enforcement was supposed to work, had never heard of it. A data set tracking hundreds of millions of devices was a surveillance vector he had simply not considered.
The tip came in 2017 or 2018. In 2020, as a new reporter on the Justice Department and law enforcement beat, he remembered it and started digging. By then the program had matured. DHS was using the data to track unlawful border crossings and to find unlawful immigrants in the interior of the country, and agencies had started using it for ordinary law enforcement like kidnappings.
All of it happened without a judge's supervision, without a warrant, and without most people in America knowing. His first story on commercial data tracking ran in February 2020.
How did Congress respond to post-9/11 data mining?
In 2002 the Pentagon's research agency DARPA began Total Information Awareness, a program meant to search commercial and government databases for signs of terrorist planning. Public criticism followed, and Congress cut off its funding in 2003. Parts of the research were reported to have continued under other classified programs.
Why do agencies prefer buying location data?
Court orders for location data from carriers must meet the warrant standard that the Supreme Court set in Carpenter v. United States in 2018. A purchase instead goes through a contract and a procurement office, which is routine government buying. A dataset also covers people across many carriers and apps at once. Federal contracts for such data appear in public procurement records.
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