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Privacy Government United States

IRS Used Cellphone Location Data To Try To Find Suspects (wsj.com) 24

Posted by BeauHD from the search-and-destroy dept.
The Internal Revenue Service attempted to identify and track potential criminal suspects by purchasing access to a commercial database that records the locations of millions of American cellphones. The Wall Street Journal reports: The IRS Criminal Investigation unit, or IRS CI, had a subscription to access the data in 2017 and 2018, and the way it used the data was revealed last week in a briefing by IRS CI officials to Sen. Ron Wyden's (D., Ore.) office. The briefing was described to The Wall Street Journal by an aide to the senator. IRS CI officials told Mr. Wyden's office that their lawyers had given verbal approval for the use of the database, which is sold by a Virginia-based government contractor called Venntel Inc. Venntel obtains anonymized location data from the marketing industry and resells it to governments. IRS CI added that it let its Venntel subscription lapse after it failed to locate any targets of interest during the year it paid for the service, according to Mr. Wyden's aide.

Justin Cole, a spokesman for IRS CI, said it entered into a "limited contract with Venntel to test their services against the law enforcement requirements of our agency." IRS CI pursues the most serious and flagrant violations of tax law, and it said it used the Venntel database in "significant money-laundering, cyber, drug and organized-crime cases." "The tool provided information as to where a phone with an anonymized identifier (created by Venntel) is located at different times," Mr. Cole said. "For example, if we know that a suspicious ATM deposit was made at a specific time and at a specific location, and we have one or more other data points for the same scheme, we can cross reference the data from each event to see if one or more devices were present at multiple transactions. This would then allow us to identify the device used by a potential suspect and attempt to follow that particular movement."

IRS CI "attempted to use Venntel data to look for location records for mobile devices that were consistently present during multiple financial transactions related to an alleged crime," Mr. Cole said. He said that the tool could be used to track an individual criminal suspect once one was identified but said that it didn't do so because the tool produced no leads.
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IRS Used Cellphone Location Data To Try To Find Suspects More

IRS Used Cellphone Location Data To Try To Find Suspects

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  • Wait, what? (Score:3)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @09:09PM (#60204388) Journal
    It's not a huge surprise that a law enforcement agency would use cellular tracking; it's well known that various others have done similar things(sometimes by obtaining vendor data, sometimes with stingrays); and privacy law is so toothless that the data itself can be collected more or less with impunity; and sold to pretty much anyone who seems like a worthwhile customer.

    What seems like a shock, though, is that anyone would do something like this based on 'verbal approval' from their lawyers. I wouldn't have expected the document to have made it into public record(no doubt stamped with some combination of "attorney/client work product" and "law enforcement sensitive" and may be a few other phrases that sound important and secret); but verbal approval isn't even good for ass-covering after the fact; never mind that it probably takes a fairly focused lawyer to put together appropriate legal and case law citations orally; so the verbal approval would presumably have been delivered based on at least a cursory draft of an opinion.

    If only for reasons of sheer procedure it's a trifle surprising that they didn't have to get a bunch of stuff in writing just to procure from a new vendor.
    • The better argument is that as soon as a government agency uses such systems, the data they access belongs to the people and is subject to public review -- immediately. We The People have a superior right as codified by Federal > State > Corporate legal rights. So regardless of contracts which limit publication, all data from private parties the government touches belong with the people.

      Let's ignore how they perform CYA, and instead say sure, you can do that, but internal consistency must be maintain
      • This is how you fight circumvention of the 4th Amendment. And how you bankrupt these entities clearly targeting government sales of their salacious, shitty products and services. Because all these services selling superior recon information to millionaires are entirely dependent on government contracts for survival. The millionaires and billionaires don't cover their salaries, because the millionaires and billionaires would just contract private PIs on a case by case basis.

      • Under federal law most works produced BY the FEDERAL government aren't protected by copyright. More info here:
        https://www.usa.gov/government... [usa.gov]

        That's just copyright, which actually isn't the main thing protecting this particular information. Rather, it's an NDA. No law prevents the federal government from signing an NDA or nullifies an NDA that the government signed with another party.

        > that as soon as a government agency uses such
        > systems, the data they access belongs to the people
        > and is subj

    • "What seems like a shock, though, is that anyone would do something like this based on 'verbal approval' from their lawyers. "

      Do you think your could avoid jail just because your version of Rudy gives you his stupidity black on white instead of verbally?

  • Not acceptable. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @09:19PM (#60204418)

    Financial crimes aren't victimless and it's not like the IRS was going after minor offenses. The conflict I have here is a third-party company (Venntel Inc.) was involved, profiting from providing data while ignoring any need for a warrant.

    They could fix this if they obtained a warrant for the data directly from the source and then used the third-party tool to sift the data.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Agree. This end run around warrants, because "it's not your data; it's our metadata" is BS when it's used this way, across the entire population, by a government agency.

      Anonymization isn't worth crap, and we've seen that repeatedly. Also, warrants. Get a fucking warrant.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Meh, so people who are going to do naughty things will use encrypted landlines and not carry mobile phones. It worked well for decades and will work better now because lazy doughnut munchers will be stuck relying on computers to do their work for them. Watch out for small drones though, sneaking up on your windows.

      The rich will of course rely on offshore tax haven trips for their criminal shenanigans the killing of tens of thousands through corporate and government corruption, the true serial killers.

      • The rich will of course rely on offshore tax haven trips for their criminal shenanigans the killing of tens of thousands through corporate and government corruption, the true serial killers.

        No need to when your guys are in office and pass massive tax cuts that benefit yourself. The TCJA was nothing but a HUGE handout to corporations and the super rich.And they did nothing with the money but do stock buybacks.

        None of the tax savings was spent on R&D, Plant and Equipment, hiring more people - just stock buybacks and bonuses.

        As President Trump said on the campaign trail, [nytimes.com] the system is rigged. And he is continuing to rigg it.

    • Your data is gone, once you visit a website, the data goes from your computer to a server and then it's gone. Like money blowing away in the wind...

  • Mandatory Phone Usage (Score:2, Informative)

    by aberglas ( 991072 )

    You must carry it with you at all times, switched on. And must use bio metric authentication to show that it is you.

    Already the law in western China. And you would look mighty suspicious not having a phone on you anywhere in China.

    Surely registered child sex offenders should be controlled in this manner...

  • Well ... if you are going to have a massive tax collection apparatus involving criminal law, then I guess you are going to have law enforcement.

    I mean, you can be fined and imprisoned for tax crimes, so why is enforcement surprising?

  • '' but said that it didn't do so because the tool produced no leads.''

    Wow. Because we all know that there's no way the NSA could have that data. Surely not the Israelis either.

    You have to wonder who convinced the IRS to buy data that is obviously archived by unnamed government organisations. Surely couldn't be a false flag could it?

  • With the fact that third parties have who knows what data of my phone that i never agreed to share with those particular parties. Whats worse, its clear that the data came from apple and google first, since they control the OS, yet here we are. We need the stupid phones for obvious reasons, but this is beyond ridiculous and disappointing.
  • I went to the Venntel web site and there is a place where you can opt-out. They use the mobile advertising ID, so if "limit ad tracking" is turned on, you are not being tracked. if "limit ad tracking" is turned off, then get your ID and opt-out with that ID so your history is removed, and then turn on limit ad tracking.

  • If you're OK with the IRS using it, how do you feel about others renting it?

    "Anonymized" is not really defined but there is a mention of an anonymized identifier. If that just means they're replacing the phone number with something random, then an individual record is still identifying. Look up where someone was all night every night and you know where they live. Then you can blackmail them over going to the gay bar or the Church of Satan building.

    If you're OK with the IRS using it, stop and reflect that Ni

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