{"id":21864,"date":"2022-10-03T02:12:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T09:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/?p=21864"},"modified":"2022-10-06T00:50:40","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T07:50:40","slug":"mass-surveillance-in-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/mass-surveillance-in-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Burgeoning Mass Surveillance in the US by Police, Immigration, Customs, and Military"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A couple of weeks ago, the PIA blog had a long and detailed post about Fog Reveal<\/a>. Long story short, Fog Reveal provides law enforcement with easy and often warrantless access to the precise geolocation of hundreds of millions of US citizens. Significantly, it is able to do that using standard advertising identifiers employed by both Apple and Google in their mobile operating systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a useful, if unfortunate confirmation of something that this blog has been warning about for years: that micro-targeted advertising<\/a> is, by its very nature a threat to privacy. Since it involves tracking everything that people do on the Internet, it can also be put to other purposes like police surveillance, using services like Fog Reveal. It is able to do that because data brokers can aggregate highly-personal information and then sell it to anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Surveillance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If Fog Reveal wasn\u2019t bad enough, other equally serious threats to the privacy of US citizens and others have emerged over the last few months. For example, a two-year investigation by researchers from the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University found that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operates a vast surveillance system<\/a>, using personal data drawn from a variety of databases:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ICE now uses information streams that are far more expansive and updated far more frequently, including Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) records and utility customer information, as well as call records, child welfare records, credit headers, employment records, geolocation information, health care records, housing records and social media posts. Access to those new data sets, combined with the power of algorithmic tools for sorting, matching, searching and analysis has dramatically expanded the scope and regularity of ICE surveillance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

More recently, Senator Ron Wyden, one of the leading US defenders of digital rights in general, and privacy in particular, wrote a letter to the Commissioner of the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to protest about what Wyden called \u201ctwo egregious violations of Americans\u2019 rights<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) pressuring travelers to unlock their electronic devices without adequately informing them of their rights, and<\/p>

2) downloading the contents of Americans\u2019 phones into a central database, where this data is searchable for 15 years by thousands of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, with minimal protections against abuse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The CBP tried to downplay the impact of this program, which involved storing text messages, call logs, contact lists, and in some cases photos and other sensitive data in a central database, claiming that fewer than 10,000 phones per year were affected. Nonetheless, it represents another instance of creeping surveillance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n