Local law enforcement agencies from Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using a vague cellphone tracking device, sometimes giving them the power to track people’s movements without a search warrant, according to public records and internal emails, The Associated Press shows.
Police used “FogReveal” to sift through hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, using the data to create environmental analyzes known among law enforcement as “lifestyles” of thousands of pages about the company.
Marketed by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used in criminal investigations since at least 2018, from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The device is rarely mentioned in court filings — something defense attorneys say makes it difficult to properly defend their clients in cases where the technology is used.
The company was founded by two former senior Homeland Security Department officials under former President George W. Bush. It’s based on ad ID numbers, which Fog officials say are taken from cell phone apps like Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on people’s activity and interests, according to police emails.
That advertising ID information is sold to companies like Fogg.
“This is a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, special counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital privacy advocacy group.
The documents and emails were obtained by the EFF through Freedom of Information Act requests. The group shared the files with the AP, which independently found that Fog sold the software to nearly two dozen agencies in 40 contracts, according to GovSpend, a company that tracks government spending. Analysts and legal experts who research such technologies said the filings and the AP report provide the first public account of Fog Reveal’s widespread use by local police.
“Underfunded and Inadequate”
“Local law enforcement is at the forefront of human trafficking and missing persons issues, but these departments often lag behind in technology adoption,” Matthew Broderick of Fogg Management said in an email. “We fill the gap for departments that are underfunded and understaffed.”
Despite the mystery surrounding Fog, there are few details about its use. Most law enforcement agencies do not even discuss their use of the device, raising concerns among privacy advocates that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
What sets FogReveal apart from other cell phone tracking technologies used by police is that it tracks devices by their IDs — unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers don’t contain the phone user’s name, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police track lifestyles.
“The ability to search anyone in public or at home seems to me to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment,” said Devin Hall, Greensboro’s crime data analysis supervisor. North Carolina Police Department. “I’m just angry and I feel like I’ve been betrayed and lied to.”
Hall resigned in late 2020 after months of concerns about the department’s use of hazing to police attorneys and the City Council.
While Greensboro officials initially defended the use of Fogg after admitting it, the police department allowed the subscription to expire earlier this year because it said it “doesn’t help impartial investigations.”
Low cost, less control
But federal, state, and local police agencies across America continue to use hazing with little public accountability. Local police agencies are lured in by Fog’s affordability: it can start as low as $7,500 per year. And some of the units it authorized shared access with other nearby law enforcement agencies, the emails show.
Police departments love how quickly they can get detailed location information from Fog. Geofence warrants access to GPS and other sources to track a device by obtaining such data from companies such as Google or Apple. This requires the police to obtain a warrant and ask the tech companies for the specific information they need, which can take days or weeks.
By A.P. According to the user agreement, the police can search an area by geo-fencing or using a special device’s advertisement ID number.
In the year According to a sales representative who emailed the California Highway Patrol in 2018, Fogg said, “We have no way of linking the signs to a specific device or owner,” after a marshal asked if the device could be used legally.
Despite such privacy assurances, the records show that law enforcement can use Fogg’s data as a tip to obtain identifying information. “There is no[personal information]associated with the advertising ID,” a Missouri official wrote about Fog in 2019. But if we are good at what we do, we should be able to recognize the owner.
Privacy groups condemn police fog.
“It’s wrong for advertisers to secretly track us, and it’s criminal to sell our data to the police,” Albert Fox-Kahn, director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said in a statement. “A country where officers can search anyone, at any time, without a warrant does not seem democratic. Because there is no oversight, we don’t know how many times officers have abused this power.”
It looks at the implementation of the Federation
Federal oversight of companies like Fogg is an evolving legal landscape. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission sued Kochava, a data broker that Fogg said provided its clients with advertising IDs that could be easily used to locate mobile device users, in violation of the commission’s enforcement rules. And now there are bills before Congress that would regulate the industry if passed.
Fogg’s Broderick said in an email that the company doesn’t have access to people’s personal data and that “data available commercially for unlimited use” comes from data brokers who “legally purchase data from apps in accordance with their legal agreements.” The company declined to share information on how many police agencies it works with.
“We are confident that responsible leadership, restraints and political guidance at the municipal, state and federal level will ensure that law enforcement at the municipal, state and federal levels are used appropriately in accordance with applicable law,” Broderick said. .
