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US Defense Intelligence Agency bought warrantless phone location data

(Worthy News) – A report published Friday reveals that the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in recent years bought American smartphone location data with first obtaining warrants, Common Dreams reports. As the DIA is responsible for apprising military and civilian policymakers about the actions and intentions of foreign governments and non-state actors, the current revelation has caused digital rights advocates to react with alarm.

The DIA’s action was first revealed by the New York Times on Jan. 22, in the form of agency responses to questions asked by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Senator Wyden had asked the DIA to explain how it interprets Carpenter v. United States, a 2018 US Supreme Court decision prohibiting law enforcement agencies from asking cellphone companies to provide personal location information without obtaining a court-ordered search warrant first. “DIA does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially-available data for intelligence purposes,” the agency answered.

When Wyden then asked whether the DIA differentiates between phone location data obtained inside the US and that obtained abroad, the agency replied: “DIA’s data provider does not supply separate streams of U.S. and foreign location data, and so DIA processes the location data as it arrives to identify U.S. location data points, which it segregates in a separate database.”

“DIA personnel can only query this database of U.S. location data when authorized by the DIA chief of staff and DIA’s office of general counsel,” the agency added. “Permission to query DIA’s database of commercially acquired U.S. device location data has been granted five times in the past two-and-a-half years, when DIA first started buying this source of data.”

Condemning the current situation in a Senate speech Wednesday, Wyden said there is now a situation in which “the government, instead of getting an order, just goes out and purchases the private records of Americans from these sleazy and unregulated commercial data brokers who are simply above the law.”