Lawmakers take pick to ICE's warrantless location tracking purchases

A group of 70 US lawmakers has called on Homeland Security's inspector general to investigate whether its agencies - including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - illegally purchased Americans' location data without first obtaining warrants. An earlier probe found that ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Close the damn loophole

At least before this Supreme Court shredded the Fourth Amendment, the test was whether people had a reasonable expectation of privacy in that data.

Stuff you post on Twitter isn't private.

This clearly is.

Call the purchase order loophole exactly what it is: gaslighting. The folks who took them away want us to forget we ever considered this information to be private in the first place.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Close the damn loophole

Yep. Make collecting certain info on people without a warrant illegal, regardless of how they get it. "I just bought it from ___" doesn't work for stolen merchandise or for drugs; it shouldn't work for the government either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no, that would mean Kristi would have to do actual work!

Does she have an outfit for that, with a cool hat? Does Corey like it!

[flayman]

"You are being watched. The government has a secret system — a machine — that spies on you every hour of every day. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything."

[KittenHuffer]

That is .... interesting! Don't people find that .... interesting?

[powershift]

Toothless hen

All bark and no bite.

[Eclectic Man]

Responses

Homeland Security did not respond to The Register's request for comment.

I think you mean "reply". They are probably watching you right now, or at least tracking your phone, now they know you are watching them.

See, for example, Patrick Cockburn's piece in the 'I' newspaper of 24 January 2026 entitled "The warped underachievers fuelling Trump's cruelty". He refers to a paper 'Why underachievers dominate secret police organisations: Evidence from autocratic Argentina' by Adam Scharpf and Christian Glaessel in the American Journal of Political Science. Basically, if you are no good at anything, then you are going to be super obedient if paid a lot to be brutal (ICE agents get a bonus for each person they arrest, so any excuse will do).