Thread by @blmohr

The Trump admin has been using a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones to monitor migrants at the Mexican border wsj.com/articles/feder…

We need new laws.
“Ex­perts say the in­fo amounts to one of the largest known troves of bulk data be­ing de­ployed by law en­force­ment in the U.S.—and that the use ap­pears to be on firm le­gal foot­ing be­cause the gov­ernment buys ac­cess to it from a com­mer­cial ven­dor...”

“...a di­vi­sion of DHS that cre­ates ex­per­i­men­tal prod­ucts be­gan buy­ing lo­ca­tion data in 2017 from Ven­n­tel Inc. of Hern­don, Va., a small com­pany that shares sev­eral ex­ec­s and patents with Gravy An­a­lytics, a ma­jor player in the
mo­bile-ad­ver­tis­ing world.”

“Con­tract­ing records show the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is buy­ing the lo­ca­tion data from Ven­n­tel. Ven­n­tel, in turn, pur­chased the in­fo from pri­vate mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies that sell the lo­ca­tion data of mil­lions of cell­phones to ad­ver­tis­ers...”