NYT Editorial Board: The Government Uses 'Near Perfect Surveillance' Data on Americans

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

The Government Uses ‘Near Perfect Surveillance’ Data on Americans

Congressional hearings are urgently needed to address location tracking.

By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Feb. 7, 2020, 6:24 p.m. ET

“When the government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,” wrote John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, in a 2018 ruling that prevented the government from obtaining location data
from cellphone towers without a warrant.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the decision, Carpenter v. United States.

With that judicial intent in mind, it is alarming to read a new report in The Wall Street Journal that found the Trump administration “has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement.”

The data used by the government comes not from the phone companies but from a location data company, one of many that are quietly and relentlessly collecting the precise movements of all smartphone-owning Americans through their phone apps.

-snip-

Since that data is available for sale, it seems the government believes that no court oversight is necessary. “The federal government has essentially found a workaround by purchasing location data used by marketing firms rather than going to court on a case-by-case basis,” The Journal reported. “Because location data is available through numerous commercial ad exchanges, government lawyers have approved the programs and concluded that the Carpenter ruling doesn’t apply.”

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/opinion/dhs-cell-phone-tracking.html

[Voltaire2]

1. As do our corporate masters.

But this is only bad if it’s the Chinese doing it. Also see for example our outrage at their mass incarceration policies directed at a minority population.

[dalton99a]

2. There should be House hearings

Chief Justice Roberts outlined those stakes in his Carpenter ruling. “The retrospective quality of the data here gives police access to a category of information otherwise unknowable. In the past, attempts to reconstruct a person’s movements were limited by a dearth of records and the frailties of recollection. With access to [cellphone location data], the Government can now travel back in time to retrace a person’s whereabouts, subject only to the retention polices of the wireless carriers, which currently maintain records for up to five years. Critically, because location information is continually logged for all of the 400 million devices in the United States — not just those belonging to persons who might happen to come under investigation — this newfound tracking capacity runs against everyone.”

The courts are a ponderous and imperfect venue for protecting Fourth Amendment rights in an age of rapid technological advancement. Exhibit A is the notion that the Carpenter ruling applies only to location data captured by cellphone towers and not to location data streamed from smartphone apps, which can produce nearly identical troves of information.

For far, far too long, lawmakers have neglected their critical role in overseeing how these technologies are used. After all, concern about location tracking is bipartisan, as Republican and Democratic lawmakers told Times Opinion last year.

“I am deeply concerned by reports that the Trump administration has been secretly collecting cellphone data — without warrants — to track the location of millions of people across the United States to target individuals for deportation,” Representative Carolyn Maloney, who leads the Oversight and Reform Committee, told The Times. “Such Orwellian government surveillance threatens the privacy of every American. The federal government should not have the unfettered ability to track us in our homes, at work, at the doctor or at church. The Oversight Committee plans to fully investigate this issue to ensure that Americans’ privacy is protected.”

Surely, Congress has time to hold hearings about a matter of urgent concern to everyone who owns a smartphone or cares about the government using the most invasive corporate surveillance system ever devised against its own people.