NYT Editorial Board: The Government Uses 'Near Perfect Surveillance' Data on Americans [View all]

[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.

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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.”

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