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At least some of the U.S. intelligence community purchases commercially available cellphone data containing location information from smartphone apps and uses that to search and track the movements of U.S. citizens without a grand jury subpoena or a court order, according to an unclassified memo.
The Defense Intelligence Agency told Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon in a document made public on Friday that it “provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones," but it has only done so for "authorized purposes" five times in the past two-and-a-half years.
Sent after Wyden grilled Biden’s pick for the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, on this issue during her confirmation hearing last week, the Pentagon intelligence arm said that “the data DIA receives is global in scope and is not identified as ‘U.S. location data’ or ‘foreign location data’ by the vendor at the time it is provisioned to DIA." The agency “processes the location data as it arrives to identify U.S. location data points, that it segregates in a separate database," the memo said, noting that DIA personnel “can only query the U.S. location database when authorized through a specific process" requiring multiple levels of approval.