The favored information dealer LexisNexis started promoting face recognition companies and private location information to U.S. Customs and Border Safety late final 12 months, in line with contract paperwork obtained by way of a Freedom of Info Act request.
Based on the paperwork, obtained by the advocacy group Simply Futures Legislation and shared with The Intercept, LexisNexis Danger Options started promoting surveillance instruments to the border enforcement company in December 2022. The $15.9 million contract features a broad menu of highly effective instruments for finding people all through the US utilizing an unlimited array of non-public information, a lot of it obtained and used with out judicial oversight.
“This contract is mass surveillance in hyperdrive.”
By way of LexisNexis, CBP investigators gained a handy place to centralize, analyze, and search varied databases containing monumental volumes of intimate private info, each public and proprietary.
“This contract is mass surveillance in hyperdrive,” Julie Mao, an lawyer and co-founder of Simply Futures Legislation, informed The Intercept. “It’s horrifying {that a} rogue company reminiscent of CBP has entry to so many highly effective applied sciences on the click on of the button. Sadly, that is what LexisNexis seems now to be promoting to hundreds of police forces throughout the nation. It’s now grow to be a one-stop store for accessing a spread of invasive surveillance instruments.”
A wide range of CBP workplaces would make use of the surveillance instruments, in line with the paperwork. Amongst them is the U.S. Border Patrol, which might use LexisNexis to “assist study people and entities to find out their admissibility to the US. and their proclivity to violate U.S. legal guidelines and laws.”
Amongst different instruments, the contract exhibits LexisNexis is offering CBP with social media surveillance, entry to jail reserving information, face recognition and “geolocation evaluation & geographic mapping” of cellphones. All this information could be queried in “giant quantity on-line batching,” permitting CBP investigators to focus on broad teams of individuals and discern “connections amongst people, incidents, actions, and areas,” handily visualized by way of Google Maps.
CBP declined to remark for this story, and LexisNexis didn’t reply to an inquiry. Regardless of the specific reference to offering “LexisNexis Facial Recognition” within the contract, a truth sheet printed by the corporate on-line says, “LexisNexis Danger Options doesn’t present the Division of Homeland Safety” — CBP’s mother or father company — “or US Immigration and Customs Enforcement with license plate pictures or facial recognition capabilities.”
The contract contains quite a lot of means for CBP to take advantage of the cellphones of these it targets. Accurint, a police and counterterror surveillance device LexisNexis acquired in 2004, permits the company to do evaluation of real-time cellphone name data and cellphone geolocation by way of its “TraX” software program.
Whereas it’s unclear how precisely TraX pinpoints its targets, LexisNexis advertising and marketing supplies cite “mobile suppliers stay pings for geolocation monitoring.” These supplies additionally be aware that TraX incorporates each “name element data obtained by way of authorized course of (i.e. search warrant or courtroom order) and third-party machine geolocation info.” A 2023 LexisNexis promotional brochure says, “The LexisNexis Danger Options Geolocation Investigative Workforce provides geolocation evaluation and investigative case help to regulation enforcement and public security clients.”
Any CBP use of geolocational information is controversial, given the company’s current historical past. Prior reporting discovered that, moderately than request cellphone location information by way of a search warrant, CBP merely bought such information from unregulated brokers — a apply that critics say permits the federal government to sidestep Fourth Modification protections towards police searches.
Based on a September report by 404 Media, CBP not too long ago informed Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., it “is not going to be using Business Telemetry Knowledge (CTD) after the conclusion of FY23 (September 30, 2023),” utilizing a technical time period for such commercially bought location info.
The company, nonetheless, additionally informed Wyden that it might renew its use of economic location information if there have been “a important mission want” sooner or later. It’s unclear if this contract supplied industrial location information to CBP, or if it was affected by the company’s dedication to Wyden. (LexisNexis didn’t reply to a query about whether or not it gives or supplied the kind of cellphone location information that CBP had sworn off.)
The contract additionally exhibits how LexisNexis operates as a reseller for surveillance instruments created by different distributors. Its social media surveillance is “powered by” Babel X, a controversial agency that CBP and the FBI have beforehand used.
Based on a Could 2023 report by Motherboard, Babel X permits customers to enter one piece of details about a surveillance goal, like a Social Safety quantity, and obtain giant quantities of collated info again. The returned information can embody “social media posts, linked IP deal with, employment historical past, and distinctive promoting identifiers related to their cell phone. The monitoring can apply to U.S. individuals, together with residents and everlasting residents, in addition to refugees and asylum seekers.”
Whereas LexisNexis is understood to offer comparable information companies to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, one other division of the Division of Homeland Safety, particulars of its surveillance work with CBP weren’t beforehand identified. Although each businesses implement immigration regulation, CBP sometimes focuses on enforcement alongside the border, whereas ICE detains and deports migrants inland.
In recent times, CBP has drawn harsh criticism from civil libertarians and human rights advocates for its actions each at and much from the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2020, CBP was discovered to have flown a Predator surveillance drone over Minneapolis protests after the homicide of George Floyd; two months later, CBP brokers in unmarked automobiles seized racial justice protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon — an act the American Civil Liberties Union condemned as a “blatant demonstration of unconstitutional authoritarianism.”
Simply Futures Legislation is presently suing LexisNexis over claims it illegally obtains and sells private information.
