Journal-Courier staff, dbauer@myjournalcourier.com

When the government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phones 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 carriers database of physical location information, 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.

Many apps weather apps or coupon apps, for instance gather and record location data without users understanding what the code is up to. That data can then be sold to third-party buyers including, apparently, the government.

Since that data is available for sale, it seems the government believes that no court oversight is necessary.

Use of this type of location-tracking data by the government has not been tested in court. And in the private sector, location data and the multibillion-dollar advertising ecosystem that has eagerly embraced it are both opaque and largely unregulated.

The use of location data to aid in deportations also demonstrates how out of date the notion of informed consent has become. When users accept the terms and conditions for various digital products, not only are they uninformed about how their data is gathered, they are also consenting to future uses that they could never predict.

Without oversight, it is inconceivable that tactics turned against unauthorized immigrants wont eventually be turned to the enforcement of other laws. As the world has seen in the streets of Hong Kong, where protesters wear masks to avoid a network of government facial-recognition cameras, once a surveillance technology is widely deployed in a society it is almost impossible to uproot.

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, Rep. 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.

New York Times

Read the rest here:

Editorial: Surveillance by government must have oversight - Jacksonville Journal-Courier