How the US' ICE became a domestic surveillance agency

[robkelk]

Full report at americandragnet.org. Summary story on The Register.

From the Executive Summary of the report:

• ICE has scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults.
  
• ICE has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.
  
• ICE tracks the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.
  
• ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.
  

And almost all of that was done without a warrant.

(I was not aware that Thomson Reuters was in the data-broker business... but they're one of the USA's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's data sources.)

[LynnInDenver]

Yeah, right now it's clear that law enforcement is taking advantage of what amounts to a "loophole" that doesn't ban general data collection purchases. And all it takes is ONE agency doing it, and that information can be shared with the rest.

There's efforts underway to close the loophole off by requiring warrants for data purchasing, but we'll see how much traction those get and how many jurisdictions manage it.

[hazard]

Frankly, this isn't the sort of thing you can deal with through closing loopholes in the law regarding data purchasing.

Because it'd be trivial to avoid, just ask your pal in a friendly but foreign intelligence service to purchase the data and share it for intelligence coordination purposes. Plenty of laws protecting your own citizens from your own government, sure, but there are very few governments who extend any such protection to other citizens from other nations so long as they aren't on your soil.

Only way to deal with this is by thoroughly regulating data collection by anyone and enforcing those laws.