Thomson Reuters Slammed for Deal That Gives ICE Access to Private Profiles of Tens of Millions of Americans

More than two dozen watchdog organizations are calling on Congress to investigate reports that the data broker Thomson Reuters is making its investigative database available to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which they warn will make Americans vulnerable to Fourth Amendment violations.

Last month, documents unearthed by 404 Media revealed:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data—which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information—to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud.

On Tuesday, a coalition of advocacy groups, including Public Citizen, ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, sent a letter to members of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees warning about the deal.

"The reporting highlights a problem that has continued to grow in recent years: Federal agencies are purchasing access to commercially aggregated personal information that they could not otherwise obtain without judicial oversight," the letter says. "This growing practice threatens to erode the protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment and underscores the urgent need for Congress to close the data broker loophole."

Thomson Reuters is primarily known for its leading international news agency, but it is also a major data broker that sells access to its dozens of databases to businesses and governments.

ICE has been buying data from Thomson Reuters since 2008. But the Trump administration hopes to dramatically expand the scale of this data collection by accessing the company's CLEAR database, which compiles vast amounts of information, including addresses, phone records, utility information, vehicle registrations, license plate records, social media activity, geolocation data, and other information.

While much of this data could be acquired through other means, the watchdog groups explained that "aggregating them into searchable investigative dossiers dramatically expands government surveillance capabilities, which further run the risk of being supercharged by the rapid growth and use of artificial intelligence by the federal government."

A DHS procurement document reviewed by 404 stated that Thomson Reuters "is the only contractor able to provide ICE with a continuous monitoring and alert service for millions of individuals and entities of interest; this is essential for national security purposes.”

Thomson Reuters has denied that selling CLEAR access presents a constitutional risk, stating earlier this year that "CLEAR does not contain the types of information that law enforcement traditionally need a warrant to obtain, and CLEAR does not include information about an individual’s citizenship or immigration status."

The letter from advocacy groups also notes that the use of this technology in voter fraud investigations, in addition to immigration and national security, "demonstrates the broad range of government functions now supported by commercially acquired surveillance tools."

The documents do not make clear how ICE plans to use the data from Thomson Reuters in a voter fraud investigation.

Trump has directed the federal government to use DHS citizenship and immigration records to identify suspected noncitizen voters and commanded states—in an order that has been blocked by a federal judge—to turn over information about their voters.

While the administration says the goal is to root out noncitizen voters, voting rights advocates have warned that many eligible voters are also at risk of being wrongly purged.

As 404 pointed out, news of the agreement with Thomson Reuters came "after President [Donald] Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference about election security" in July, "setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections."

The letter urges Congress to hold oversight hearings examining federal agencies' acquisition and use of commercially available information from data brokers, require transparency about what data agencies are purchasing and how it's being used, and examine whether existing law surrounding data purchasing adequately protects constitutional rights.

It also calls on the government to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that would close the data broker loophole by preventing the government from buying data from private companies that it would ordinarily need a judicial warrant to obtain directly from an individual or company.

"Americans should not lose their Fourth Amendment rights simply because the government is willing to purchase its way around our rights," said JB Branch, the director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen. "Big Tech and Big Data companies like Thomson Reuters need to decide whether profiting from government surveillance is compatible with the values they claim to hold.”