A cop pulled over Ivan Lopez in Somerton, Arizona, a small town near the Mexican border.
The officer claimed Lopez had a broken taillight and had been speeding.
This from reason.com.
A drug-sniffing dog then indicated possible contraband. Police searched his truck and found fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, and meth. Lopez subsequently agreed to a plea deal where he would serve 84 months in prison for drug smuggling.
The traffic stop was in 2018. Lopez (and his lawyers) did not discover until 2020 that it was neither the traffic offenses nor the dog that led to Lopez’s downfall:
It was location data from his phone, which revealed he was passing through the border at a place where there was no monitored crossing.
A secret underground tunnel led from Mexico to a property he owned in the Arizona border town of San Luis.
A handful of small-town border cops hadn’t been actively monitoring Lopez’s phone location. They were purchasing the information from third-party brokers, who were collecting GPS data produced by the apps on Lopez’s phone.
Byron Tau, then a Wall Street Journal reporter, reported in 2020:
[T]he federal government, particularly immigration officials, had begun purchasing such data, which had typically been meant for use by advertising companies.
In the course of reporting his story, it was Tau who told Lopez’s lawyers about the data purchases.
NOTE: Both local and federal police were bypassing Fourth Amendment restrictions to get information that would typically require probable cause and a warrant.
Such stories animate Tau’s Means of Control, a book that documents how, across more than two decades, our government has turned to the private sector to keep tabs on us, all while both the authorities and the companies involved do everything they can to keep Americans in the dark.
Just days after 9/11, a data collection firm called Acxiom ran the terrorists’ names through its databases to see what it could find. It found information about 11 of them. Then the company expanded its search to cover people who shared addresses with the men, looking for connections to others within the U.S. who might be planning attacks. Meanwhile, a rival firm, Seisint, was doing something similar, trying to develop profiles of potential terrorists and searching through the company’s data to see who matched.
This was a fishing expedition—a broad search of information in the hopes of finding evidence of misconduct. Before police can collect or search our data, they are supposed to have a reasonable suspicion that the individuals involved are engaged in criminal activity; they aren’t supposed to gather people’s data first and then look it over to see if they’ve done anything wrong.
Axciom and Seisint, however, are not law enforcement agencies, and that’s where the privacy protections start to break down.
The third-party doctrine, which dates back to Supreme Court rulings from the 1970s, holds that data that Americans voluntarily provide to banks, phone companies, and other third parties do not have the same Fourth Amendment protections as data we store for ourselves.
In the wake of 9/11, interestingly, Defense Department lawyers actually warned Pentagon officials away from attempting to incorporate data from these firms into their intelligence.
Those warnings went unheeded. Tau’s book is an in-depth account of how the U.S. went from a place where federal lawyers cautioned against combing through privately gathered data to one where government agencies spend untold sums of taxpayer money purchasing the information.
Tau’s extensive research gives readers a detailed tour of the bafflingly complex ecosystem of brokers and buyers of this information. The cynical may be surprised to learn that there are people within the government who treat citizen privacy seriously and resist these surveillance methods. The cynical will not be surprised when other officials and their private-sector allies figure out ways to get around that resistance.
Even as Tau shows us how transparent our lives are, much of the process by which data is transferred into the hands of brokers and then to the government remains fairly opaque. Keep in mind too, government is the driving force behind this marketplace. Any potential solution that actually works would likely involve either legislative action or court decisions restricting what data the government can collect. But the current tyrannical Regime does not abide by the constitution and the laws.
The bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act—HR 4639:
[W]ould require a law enforcement or intelligence agency to obtain a court order before acquiring customer or subscriber information from a third party. Under the bill, any information purchased from a third party would be inadmissible as evidence in court.
The bill garnered unanimous support from the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee this past July, which would seem like a positive sign. But an attempt to fold the legislation into a larger surveillance reform bill failed, and the measure’s future is unclear.
As Tau has said:
Nobody ever went bankrupt betting on Congress doing nothing.
Final thoughts: Meanwhile, any item you do not want tracked, purchase it with cash. And, when possible, DO NOT carry a cell phone. Automobiles and GPS are further considerations.
