Monday, October 06, 2025

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day

 BIG MONEY: Fraudsters stole about $320 million in SNAP benefits over 2-year period. “GAO noted that available data understates the actual scale of SNAP theft, given that states are not required to report every occurrence, so many thefts go undisclosed.”




ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day

404 Media: Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ phones. “The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media. 

The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. 

The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice…”