Lawmakers take pick to ICE's warrantless location tracking purchases

A group of 70 US lawmakers has called on Homeland Security's inspector general to investigate whether its agencies - including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - illegally purchased Americans' location data without first obtaining warrants.

An earlier probe found that ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the Secret Service were all illegally purchasing people's data, and that program ended in 2023. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general also found serious privacy oversteps - including employees sharing accounts and passwords for phone-tracking databases, supervisors failing to request or review audit logs to detect patterns of abuse, and in one instance, a DHS employee abusing this phone location data to track coworkers.

The inspector general also recommended several actions to ensure better oversight of federal workers' access to this type of information, including a DHS-wide policy governing the use of commercial location data. 

According to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who ...