DHS' IG says it's probing the department's practice of tracking people without a warrant by buying brokered cellphone data, after Democratic senators' request
a contractor that works with ICE—obtains location data from apps. Names the middlemen companies that feed the data. Unclear if ICE gets all data from this chain, but certainly Venntel gets it https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : The GDPR requests showed that Sygic (one of the app developers) said it shared information with two other firms. Complementics and Predicio. These companies are data middlemen, obtaining data from one place and selling it onto another https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : These new findings are based on GDPR requests. In Europe, residents can request their data from companies, including US contractors. Norwegian broadcaster NRK did this to a ton of companies, and sketched out some of the Venntel supply chain https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Ailo / @airavn : Here's more on how a person in Norway installing a weather app with swear words can have their information end up with US intelligence agencies. The system is broken. https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Then a request with Gravy, the huge advertising firm, said it obtained data from Complementics and Predicio. And crucially, Gravy said it supplied data to Venntel, the ICE contractor. We long suspected Gravy gave the data to Venntel but this is solid now https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... @hypervisible : “If law enforcement agencies can buy their way around the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement, the landmark protection announced by the Supreme Court in Carpenter will be in peril...” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Hamed Aleaziz / @haleaziz : .@ByronTau reports DHS lawyers began examining use of location data after “concerns were raised by several offices within the department that use of the technology wasn't compatible with a 2018 Supreme Court ruling” https://www.wsj.com/... Chris Hoofnagle / @hoofnagle : WSJ: DHS' “internal watchdog said it would open an investigation into the use of mobile-phone surveillance technologies to track Americans without a warrant, the latest salvo in a debate within the U.S. government over the legality of such techniques.” https://www.wsj.com/...?
Context & Ripple Effects
The probe is the first institutional response to a supply chain that journalists had already mapped piece by piece: app developers like Sygic selling to middlemen Complementics and Predicio, who feed Gravy, which supplies Venntel, the ICE contractor. It follows years of reporting on how ICE built its data apparatus across administrations, including its aggressive use of big data and social media against undocumented immigrants.
Democratic senators' request turned that reporting into an oversight action, and DHS lawyers are now examining whether the practice survives the Supreme Court's Carpenter ruling. The same broker-to-agency pipeline has since surfaced elsewhere — CBP and ICE using Babel Street's Locate X, and Treasury's own purchases of Babel Street location data — so the IG's findings could set a precedent well beyond DHS.
First-order effects
- DHS's data-broker purchases face formal scrutiny, with department lawyers specifically testing whether buying location data is a lawful end-run around the Carpenter warrant requirement.
- The named middlemen — Gravy, Venntel, Complementics, Predicio — are now on the record as the supply chain for ICE location data, exposing them to the same GDPR-driven disclosures that revealed their roles.
Second-order effects
- Other agencies in the same market — Treasury with Babel Street, and per Mobilewalla's later letter to Sen. Wyden, DHS, IRS, and the military — face pressure to disclose or defend identical purchases before their own IGs or Congress do it for them.
- Data brokers' government contracts become a reputational and legal liability, forcing the industry to choose between the lucrative public-sector channel and the app-developer relationships that feed it.
Third-order effects
- If the IG concludes purchased location data requires a warrant, the entire broker-to-agency pipeline becomes structurally unworkable without new legislation — shifting the fight from individual agencies to Congress defining the Fourth Amendment boundary for commercially sold data.
The trend: Government agencies are buying their way around the warrant requirement through commercial location brokers, and inspector generals and FOIA disclosures are slowly forcing that market into the open.