A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.
Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for.
“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media.
The people should start buying this data to identify ICE personnel involved in incidents. It’s not like you need to be law enforcement to get access to this. You just need money.
Pretty sure someone was able to pose as a PI and get paid access a while ago.
Darknet Diaries had an episode on it
I bet a nonprofit would have a reasonable chance of raising the funds to buy the data and publicly publish it.
We need to be more careful than that, no one wants to end up on a list when a non-profit is required to show its books.
Should be a very private and affordable for-profit with some reasonable way to keep payments off the books
Are nonprofits required to track who they receive donations from? I could be wrong, but I don’t think they are. They have to have financial records, but I don’t think that means maintaining a donor list.
It depends on the details of the non-profit. In the circumstances I see, you’re not required to make it public, but you ARE required to provide the list to the government.
I can say, If you started a non-profit and used it to track ice, they most certainly would obtain a list of your doners if they had to go and take it from the hands of your payment provider. Even most crypto isn’t fully safe because of banking reporting required
That’s a good point, they’d definitely just subpoena your bank records. If crypto is used properly, it can be nigh impossible to trace, though. Bitcoin isn’t very private at all on the blockchain, but if you send over lightning network, my understanding is that it becomes effectively impossible to track, unless your adversary controls enough lightning network nodes to track the payment as it bounces between nodes. They wouldn’t need to control the whole path, but they would need to control nodes VERY close to origin and destination, ideally the adjacent nodes, and enough of those in the middle to be reasonably sure they can accurately follow the money. The lightning network doesn’t leave a detailed ledger behind, so only way to trace a payment is to be involved in its processing, which means controlling the nodes the money passes through on its way to the recipient.
Of course, that’s way too obscure and unknown for the vast majority of people, so I don’t see a nonprofit succeeding that way these days. Maybe if crypto actually does get mainstream, but that’s still a pretty big if.
Heh onion routing for bitcoin payments, that’s pretty neat. The receiver ends up hanging a bit in the wind.
Maybe it could be a steam game or something with pausible deniablilty
Actually, the way the payments are structured, no money moves AT ALL if ANYONE in the chain tries to back out. It maintains the trustless nature of crypto. I don’t recall the specifics of how it’s done, though.
No, hanging in the wind as being the receiver. Kinda like tor exit nodes can’t hide. Unlike tor exit nodes (well for the time being) you can get hit for recieving the money and paying for something deemed illegal wiht it.