September 1, 2022 GMT https://apnews.com/article/technology-police-california-arkansas-d395409ef5a8c6c3f6cdab5b1d0e27ef Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina are using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, sometimes without search warrants, that allows them to track people’s movements back months, according to public records. files and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. Police used Fog Reveal to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices and leveraged the data to create location analyzes known to law enforcement as “life patterns,” according to thousands of pages of records for the company. . Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracking the movements of a possible participant in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, which defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases where the technology was used. The company was developed by two former high-ranking officials of the Department of Homeland Security under former President George W. Bush. It relies on ad identifiers, which Fog officials say have been pulled from popular mobile apps like Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. This information is then sold to companies like Fog. “It’s kind of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, special counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.
This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series, “Tracked,” that explores the power and consequences of algorithm-driven decisions in people’s daily lives.
The documents and emails were obtained by the EFF through Freedom of Information Act requests. The group shared the records with the AP, which independently found that Fog sold its software on about 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies, according to GovSpend, a firm that tracks government spending. The AP files and reports provide the first public account of the widespread use of Fog Reveal by local police, according to analysts and legal experts who scrutinize such technologies. “Local law enforcement is on the front lines of human trafficking and missing person cases, yet these departments often lag behind in technology adoption,” Matthew Broderick, Fog’s administrator, said in an email. “We fill a void for underfunded and understaffed departments.” Because of the secrecy surrounding Fog, however, there are few details about its use, and most law enforcement agencies won’t discuss it, raising concerns among privacy advocates that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects from unreasonable search and seizure. What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cell phone tracking technologies used by police is that it tracks devices through their promotional identifiers, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the phone user’s name, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police build up patterns of living. “The ability that he had to highlight anyone in an area whether it was in public or at home seemed to me to be a very clear violation of the Fourth Amendment,” said Davin Hall, former supervisor of crime data analysis for Greensboro. , North Carolina Police Department. “I just feel angry and betrayed and I lied to him.” Hall resigned in late 2020 after months of raising concerns about the department’s use of Fog to police attorneys and the city council. While Greensboro officials acknowledged Fog’s use and initially defended it, the police department said it allowed his membership to expire earlier this year because it did not “independently benefit investigations.” However, federal, state and local police agencies in the US continue to use Fog with very little public accountability. Local police agencies have been lured by Fog’s affordability: it can start at $7,500 a year. And some departments that license it share access with other neighboring law enforcement agencies, the emails show. Police departments also like how quickly they can access detailed location information from Fog. Geofence warrants, which leverage GPS and other sources to track a device, are accessed by downloading such data from companies such as Google or Apple. That requires police to get a warrant and ask tech companies for the specific data they want, which can take days or weeks. Using Fog’s data, which the company claims is anonymized, police can geo-trace an area or search a specific device’s ad ID numbers, according to a user agreement obtained by the AP. However, Fog maintains that “we have no way to link the signals back to a specific device or owner,” according to a sales representative who emailed the California Highway Patrol in 2018 after a lieutenant asked if the tool could be used legally. . Despite these assurances of privacy, records show that law enforcement can use Fog’s data as a clue to find identifying information. “There is no (personal information) associated with (ad ID),” a Missouri official wrote of Fog in 2019. “But if we’re good at what we do, we should be able to figure out the owner.” Federal oversight of companies like Fog is an evolving legal landscape. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission sued a data broker called Kochava that, like Fog, provides its clients with advertising identifiers that authorities say can easily be used to find where a mobile device user lives, which violates the rules imposed by the committee. And there are bills now before Congress that, if passed, would regulate the industry. Fog’s Broderick said in an email that the company does not have access to people’s personal information and draws from “commercially available data without restrictions on use,” from data brokers “who legally buy data from apps in accordance with their legal agreements.” The company declined to share information about how many police agencies it works with. “We are confident that Law Enforcement has the responsible leadership, restraints and political guidance at the municipal, state and federal levels to ensure that any law enforcement tool and method is used appropriately in accordance with the laws in their respective jurisdictions,” he said. Broderick. .
Kevin Metcalf, the district attorney for Washington County, Arkansas, said he used Fog Reveal without a warrant, especially in “exigent circumstances.” In these cases, the law provides an exception to a warrant when a crime in progress endangers people or an officer. Metcalf also leads the National Child Protection Task Force, a non-profit organization that fights child exploitation and trafficking. Fog is listed on its website as a sponsor of the task force, and a company executive chairs the nonprofit’s board. Metcalf said the fog has been valuable in solving missing child and homicide cases. “We’re pushing boundaries, but we’re doing it in a way that targets the bad guys,” he said. “Time is of the essence in these situations. We can’t wait on the traditional search warrant route.” The fog was successfully used in the slaying of 25-year-old nurse Sidney Sutherland, who was last seen jogging near Newport, Arkansas before she disappeared, Metcalf said. Police had little evidence to go on when they found her phone in a ditch, so Metcalf said he shared his agency’s access to Fog with the US Marshals Service to figure out what other devices were nearby at the time she was killed. He said the fog helped authorities arrest a farmer in the August 2020 rape and murder of Sutherland, but its use was not documented in court records reviewed by the AP. Cyphers, who led the EFF’s public records project, said there has been no previous record of companies selling this kind of granular data directly to local law enforcement. “We’re seeing counties with less than 100,000 people where the sheriff is using this extremely high-tech, extremely invasive, covert surveillance tool to go after local crime,” Cyphers said. One such client is the sheriff’s office in rural North Carolina’s Rockingham County, population 91,000 and just north of Greensboro, where Hall still lives. The county bought a one-year permit for $9,000 last year and recently renewed it. “Rockingham County is small in terms of population. It never ceases to amaze me how small companies will collect tools that they just don’t need and nobody needs that,” Hall said. Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Kevin Suthard confirmed the department recently renewed its license, but declined to offer details about the use of Fog Reveal or how the office protects people’s rights. “Because then it would be less effective as criminals could know we have the device and adjust the way they commit their crimes accordingly. Does that make sense?” said Suthard. Fog has aggressively marketed its tool to police, even beta testing it with law enforcement, records show. The Dallas Police Department purchased a Fog license in February after receiving a free trial and “saw a demonstration and heard success stories from the company,” Senior Cpl. Melinda Gutierrez, a spokeswoman for the department, said in an email. Fog’s tool is accessible through a web portal. Investigators can enter the coordinates of a crime scene into the database, which returns search results showing a device’s Fog ID, which is based on its unique Ad ID number. Police can see what device IDs were found near the crime scene. Detective…
title: “Tech Tool Offers Police Mass Surveillance On A Budget Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-01” author: “Christopher Recio”
September 1, 2022 GMT https://apnews.com/article/technology-police-california-arkansas-d395409ef5a8c6c3f6cdab5b1d0e27ef Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina are using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, sometimes without search warrants, that allows them to track people’s movements back months, according to public records. files and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. Police used Fog Reveal to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices and leveraged the data to create location analyzes known to law enforcement as “life patterns,” according to thousands of pages of records for the company. . Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracking the movements of a possible participant in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, which defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases where the technology was used. The company was developed by two former high-ranking officials of the Department of Homeland Security under former President George W. Bush. It relies on ad identifiers, which Fog officials say have been pulled from popular mobile apps like Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. This information is then sold to companies like Fog. “It’s kind of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, special counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.
This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series, “Tracked,” that explores the power and consequences of algorithm-driven decisions in people’s daily lives.
The documents and emails were obtained by the EFF through Freedom of Information Act requests. The group shared the records with the AP, which independently found that Fog sold its software on about 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies, according to GovSpend, a firm that tracks government spending. The AP files and reports provide the first public account of the widespread use of Fog Reveal by local police, according to analysts and legal experts who scrutinize such technologies. “Local law enforcement is on the front lines of human trafficking and missing person cases, yet these departments often lag behind in technology adoption,” Matthew Broderick, Fog’s administrator, said in an email. “We fill a void for underfunded and understaffed departments.” Because of the secrecy surrounding Fog, however, there are few details about its use, and most law enforcement agencies won’t discuss it, raising concerns among privacy advocates that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects from unreasonable search and seizure. What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cell phone tracking technologies used by police is that it tracks devices through their promotional identifiers, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the phone user’s name, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police build up patterns of living. “The ability that he had to highlight anyone in an area whether it was in public or at home seemed to me to be a very clear violation of the Fourth Amendment,” said Davin Hall, former supervisor of crime data analysis for Greensboro. , North Carolina Police Department. “I just feel angry and betrayed and I lied to him.” Hall resigned in late 2020 after months of raising concerns about the department’s use of Fog to police attorneys and the city council. While Greensboro officials acknowledged Fog’s use and initially defended it, the police department said it allowed his membership to expire earlier this year because it did not “independently benefit investigations.” However, federal, state and local police agencies in the US continue to use Fog with very little public accountability. Local police agencies have been lured by Fog’s affordability: it can start at $7,500 a year. And some departments that license it share access with other neighboring law enforcement agencies, the emails show. Police departments also like how quickly they can access detailed location information from Fog. Geofence warrants, which leverage GPS and other sources to track a device, are accessed by downloading such data from companies such as Google or Apple. That requires police to get a warrant and ask tech companies for the specific data they want, which can take days or weeks. Using Fog’s data, which the company claims is anonymized, police can geo-trace an area or search a specific device’s ad ID numbers, according to a user agreement obtained by the AP. However, Fog maintains that “we have no way to link the signals back to a specific device or owner,” according to a sales representative who emailed the California Highway Patrol in 2018 after a lieutenant asked if the tool could be used legally. . Despite these assurances of privacy, records show that law enforcement can use Fog’s data as a clue to find identifying information. “There is no (personal information) associated with (ad ID),” a Missouri official wrote of Fog in 2019. “But if we’re good at what we do, we should be able to figure out the owner.” Federal oversight of companies like Fog is an evolving legal landscape. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission sued a data broker called Kochava that, like Fog, provides its clients with advertising identifiers that authorities say can easily be used to find where a mobile device user lives, which violates the rules imposed by the committee. And there are bills now before Congress that, if passed, would regulate the industry. Fog’s Broderick said in an email that the company does not have access to people’s personal information and draws from “commercially available data without restrictions on use,” from data brokers “who legally buy data from apps in accordance with their legal agreements.” The company declined to share information about how many police agencies it works with. “We are confident that Law Enforcement has the responsible leadership, restraints and political guidance at the municipal, state and federal levels to ensure that any law enforcement tool and method is used appropriately in accordance with the laws in their respective jurisdictions,” he said. Broderick. .
Kevin Metcalf, the district attorney for Washington County, Arkansas, said he used Fog Reveal without a warrant, especially in “exigent circumstances.” In these cases, the law provides an exception to a warrant when a crime in progress endangers people or an officer. Metcalf also leads the National Child Protection Task Force, a non-profit organization that fights child exploitation and trafficking. Fog is listed on its website as a sponsor of the task force, and a company executive chairs the nonprofit’s board. Metcalf said the fog has been valuable in solving missing child and homicide cases. “We’re pushing boundaries, but we’re doing it in a way that targets the bad guys,” he said. “Time is of the essence in these situations. We can’t wait on the traditional search warrant route.” The fog was successfully used in the slaying of 25-year-old nurse Sidney Sutherland, who was last seen jogging near Newport, Arkansas before she disappeared, Metcalf said. Police had little evidence to go on when they found her phone in a ditch, so Metcalf said he shared his agency’s access to Fog with the US Marshals Service to figure out what other devices were nearby at the time she was killed. He said the fog helped authorities arrest a farmer in the August 2020 rape and murder of Sutherland, but its use was not documented in court records reviewed by the AP. Cyphers, who led the EFF’s public records project, said there has been no previous record of companies selling this kind of granular data directly to local law enforcement. “We’re seeing counties with less than 100,000 people where the sheriff is using this extremely high-tech, extremely invasive, covert surveillance tool to go after local crime,” Cyphers said. One such client is the sheriff’s office in rural North Carolina’s Rockingham County, population 91,000 and just north of Greensboro, where Hall still lives. The county bought a one-year permit for $9,000 last year and recently renewed it. “Rockingham County is small in terms of population. It never ceases to amaze me how small companies will collect tools that they just don’t need and nobody needs that,” Hall said. Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Kevin Suthard confirmed the department recently renewed its license, but declined to offer details about the use of Fog Reveal or how the office protects people’s rights. “Because then it would be less effective as criminals could know we have the device and adjust the way they commit their crimes accordingly. Does that make sense?” said Suthard. Fog has aggressively marketed its tool to police, even beta testing it with law enforcement, records show. The Dallas Police Department purchased a Fog license in February after receiving a free trial and “saw a demonstration and heard success stories from the company,” Senior Cpl. Melinda Gutierrez, a spokeswoman for the department, said in an email. Fog’s tool is accessible through a web portal. Investigators can enter the coordinates of a crime scene into the database, which returns search results showing a device’s Fog ID, which is based on its unique Ad ID number. Police can see what device IDs were found near the crime scene. Detective…
title: “Tech Tool Offers Police Mass Surveillance On A Budget Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-04” author: “Christopher Rowan”
September 1, 2022 GMT https://apnews.com/article/technology-police-california-arkansas-d395409ef5a8c6c3f6cdab5b1d0e27ef Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina are using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, sometimes without search warrants, that allows them to track people’s movements back months, according to public records. files and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. Police used Fog Reveal to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices and leveraged the data to create location analyzes known to law enforcement as “life patterns,” according to thousands of pages of records for the company. . Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracking the movements of a possible participant in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, which defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases where the technology was used. The company was developed by two former high-ranking officials of the Department of Homeland Security under former President George W. Bush. It relies on ad identifiers, which Fog officials say have been pulled from popular mobile apps like Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. This information is then sold to companies like Fog. “It’s kind of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, special counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.
This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series, “Tracked,” that explores the power and consequences of algorithm-driven decisions in people’s daily lives.
The documents and emails were obtained by the EFF through Freedom of Information Act requests. The group shared the records with the AP, which independently found that Fog sold its software on about 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies, according to GovSpend, a firm that tracks government spending. The AP files and reports provide the first public account of the widespread use of Fog Reveal by local police, according to analysts and legal experts who scrutinize such technologies. “Local law enforcement is on the front lines of human trafficking and missing person cases, yet these departments often lag behind in technology adoption,” Matthew Broderick, Fog’s administrator, said in an email. “We fill a void for underfunded and understaffed departments.” Because of the secrecy surrounding Fog, however, there are few details about its use, and most law enforcement agencies won’t discuss it, raising concerns among privacy advocates that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects from unreasonable search and seizure. What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cell phone tracking technologies used by police is that it tracks devices through their promotional identifiers, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the phone user’s name, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police build up patterns of living. “The ability that he had to highlight anyone in an area whether it was in public or at home seemed to me to be a very clear violation of the Fourth Amendment,” said Davin Hall, former supervisor of crime data analysis for Greensboro. , North Carolina Police Department. “I just feel angry and betrayed and I lied to him.” Hall resigned in late 2020 after months of raising concerns about the department’s use of Fog to police attorneys and the city council. While Greensboro officials acknowledged Fog’s use and initially defended it, the police department said it allowed his membership to expire earlier this year because it did not “independently benefit investigations.” However, federal, state and local police agencies in the US continue to use Fog with very little public accountability. Local police agencies have been lured by Fog’s affordability: it can start at $7,500 a year. And some departments that license it share access with other neighboring law enforcement agencies, the emails show. Police departments also like how quickly they can access detailed location information from Fog. Geofence warrants, which leverage GPS and other sources to track a device, are accessed by downloading such data from companies such as Google or Apple. That requires police to get a warrant and ask tech companies for the specific data they want, which can take days or weeks. Using Fog’s data, which the company claims is anonymized, police can geo-trace an area or search a specific device’s ad ID numbers, according to a user agreement obtained by the AP. However, Fog maintains that “we have no way to link the signals back to a specific device or owner,” according to a sales representative who emailed the California Highway Patrol in 2018 after a lieutenant asked if the tool could be used legally. . Despite these assurances of privacy, records show that law enforcement can use Fog’s data as a clue to find identifying information. “There is no (personal information) associated with (ad ID),” a Missouri official wrote of Fog in 2019. “But if we’re good at what we do, we should be able to figure out the owner.” Federal oversight of companies like Fog is an evolving legal landscape. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission sued a data broker called Kochava that, like Fog, provides its clients with advertising identifiers that authorities say can easily be used to find where a mobile device user lives, which violates the rules imposed by the committee. And there are bills now before Congress that, if passed, would regulate the industry. Fog’s Broderick said in an email that the company does not have access to people’s personal information and draws from “commercially available data without restrictions on use,” from data brokers “who legally buy data from apps in accordance with their legal agreements.” The company declined to share information about how many police agencies it works with. “We are confident that Law Enforcement has the responsible leadership, restraints and political guidance at the municipal, state and federal levels to ensure that any law enforcement tool and method is used appropriately in accordance with the laws in their respective jurisdictions,” he said. Broderick. .
Kevin Metcalf, the district attorney for Washington County, Arkansas, said he used Fog Reveal without a warrant, especially in “exigent circumstances.” In these cases, the law provides an exception to a warrant when a crime in progress endangers people or an officer. Metcalf also leads the National Child Protection Task Force, a non-profit organization that fights child exploitation and trafficking. Fog is listed on its website as a sponsor of the task force, and a company executive chairs the nonprofit’s board. Metcalf said the fog has been valuable in solving missing child and homicide cases. “We’re pushing boundaries, but we’re doing it in a way that targets the bad guys,” he said. “Time is of the essence in these situations. We can’t wait on the traditional search warrant route.” The fog was successfully used in the slaying of 25-year-old nurse Sidney Sutherland, who was last seen jogging near Newport, Arkansas before she disappeared, Metcalf said. Police had little evidence to go on when they found her phone in a ditch, so Metcalf said he shared his agency’s access to Fog with the US Marshals Service to figure out what other devices were nearby at the time she was killed. He said the fog helped authorities arrest a farmer in the August 2020 rape and murder of Sutherland, but its use was not documented in court records reviewed by the AP. Cyphers, who led the EFF’s public records project, said there has been no previous record of companies selling this kind of granular data directly to local law enforcement. “We’re seeing counties with less than 100,000 people where the sheriff is using this extremely high-tech, extremely invasive, covert surveillance tool to go after local crime,” Cyphers said. One such client is the sheriff’s office in rural North Carolina’s Rockingham County, population 91,000 and just north of Greensboro, where Hall still lives. The county bought a one-year permit for $9,000 last year and recently renewed it. “Rockingham County is small in terms of population. It never ceases to amaze me how small companies will collect tools that they just don’t need and nobody needs that,” Hall said. Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Kevin Suthard confirmed the department recently renewed its license, but declined to offer details about the use of Fog Reveal or how the office protects people’s rights. “Because then it would be less effective as criminals could know we have the device and adjust the way they commit their crimes accordingly. Does that make sense?” said Suthard. Fog has aggressively marketed its tool to police, even beta testing it with law enforcement, records show. The Dallas Police Department purchased a Fog license in February after receiving a free trial and “saw a demonstration and heard success stories from the company,” Senior Cpl. Melinda Gutierrez, a spokeswoman for the department, said in an email. Fog’s tool is accessible through a web portal. Investigators can enter the coordinates of a crime scene into the database, which returns search results showing a device’s Fog ID, which is based on its unique Ad ID number. Police can see what device IDs were found near the crime scene. Detective…
title: “Tech Tool Offers Police Mass Surveillance On A Budget Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-10-24” author: “Nancy Wilson”
September 1, 2022 GMT https://apnews.com/article/technology-police-california-arkansas-d395409ef5a8c6c3f6cdab5b1d0e27ef Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina are using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, sometimes without search warrants, that allows them to track people’s movements back months, according to public records. files and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. Police used Fog Reveal to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices and leveraged the data to create location analyzes known to law enforcement as “life patterns,” according to thousands of pages of records for the company. . Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracking the movements of a possible participant in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, which defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases where the technology was used. The company was developed by two former high-ranking officials of the Department of Homeland Security under former President George W. Bush. It relies on ad identifiers, which Fog officials say have been pulled from popular mobile apps like Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. This information is then sold to companies like Fog. “It’s kind of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, special counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.
This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series, “Tracked,” that explores the power and consequences of algorithm-driven decisions in people’s daily lives.
The documents and emails were obtained by the EFF through Freedom of Information Act requests. The group shared the records with the AP, which independently found that Fog sold its software on about 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies, according to GovSpend, a firm that tracks government spending. The AP files and reports provide the first public account of the widespread use of Fog Reveal by local police, according to analysts and legal experts who scrutinize such technologies. “Local law enforcement is on the front lines of human trafficking and missing person cases, yet these departments often lag behind in technology adoption,” Matthew Broderick, Fog’s administrator, said in an email. “We fill a void for underfunded and understaffed departments.” Because of the secrecy surrounding Fog, however, there are few details about its use, and most law enforcement agencies won’t discuss it, raising concerns among privacy advocates that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects from unreasonable search and seizure. What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cell phone tracking technologies used by police is that it tracks devices through their promotional identifiers, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the phone user’s name, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police build up patterns of living. “The ability that he had to highlight anyone in an area whether it was in public or at home seemed to me to be a very clear violation of the Fourth Amendment,” said Davin Hall, former supervisor of crime data analysis for Greensboro. , North Carolina Police Department. “I just feel angry and betrayed and I lied to him.” Hall resigned in late 2020 after months of raising concerns about the department’s use of Fog to police attorneys and the city council. While Greensboro officials acknowledged Fog’s use and initially defended it, the police department said it allowed his membership to expire earlier this year because it did not “independently benefit investigations.” However, federal, state and local police agencies in the US continue to use Fog with very little public accountability. Local police agencies have been lured by Fog’s affordability: it can start at $7,500 a year. And some departments that license it share access with other neighboring law enforcement agencies, the emails show. Police departments also like how quickly they can access detailed location information from Fog. Geofence warrants, which leverage GPS and other sources to track a device, are accessed by downloading such data from companies such as Google or Apple. That requires police to get a warrant and ask tech companies for the specific data they want, which can take days or weeks. Using Fog’s data, which the company claims is anonymized, police can geo-trace an area or search a specific device’s ad ID numbers, according to a user agreement obtained by the AP. However, Fog maintains that “we have no way to link the signals back to a specific device or owner,” according to a sales representative who emailed the California Highway Patrol in 2018 after a lieutenant asked if the tool could be used legally. . Despite these assurances of privacy, records show that law enforcement can use Fog’s data as a clue to find identifying information. “There is no (personal information) associated with (ad ID),” a Missouri official wrote of Fog in 2019. “But if we’re good at what we do, we should be able to figure out the owner.” Federal oversight of companies like Fog is an evolving legal landscape. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission sued a data broker called Kochava that, like Fog, provides its clients with advertising identifiers that authorities say can easily be used to find where a mobile device user lives, which violates the rules imposed by the committee. And there are bills now before Congress that, if passed, would regulate the industry. Fog’s Broderick said in an email that the company does not have access to people’s personal information and draws from “commercially available data without restrictions on use,” from data brokers “who legally buy data from apps in accordance with their legal agreements.” The company declined to share information about how many police agencies it works with. “We are confident that Law Enforcement has the responsible leadership, restraints and political guidance at the municipal, state and federal levels to ensure that any law enforcement tool and method is used appropriately in accordance with the laws in their respective jurisdictions,” he said. Broderick. .
Kevin Metcalf, the district attorney for Washington County, Arkansas, said he used Fog Reveal without a warrant, especially in “exigent circumstances.” In these cases, the law provides an exception to a warrant when a crime in progress endangers people or an officer. Metcalf also leads the National Child Protection Task Force, a non-profit organization that fights child exploitation and trafficking. Fog is listed on its website as a sponsor of the task force, and a company executive chairs the nonprofit’s board. Metcalf said the fog has been valuable in solving missing child and homicide cases. “We’re pushing boundaries, but we’re doing it in a way that targets the bad guys,” he said. “Time is of the essence in these situations. We can’t wait on the traditional search warrant route.” The fog was successfully used in the slaying of 25-year-old nurse Sidney Sutherland, who was last seen jogging near Newport, Arkansas before she disappeared, Metcalf said. Police had little evidence to go on when they found her phone in a ditch, so Metcalf said he shared his agency’s access to Fog with the US Marshals Service to figure out what other devices were nearby at the time she was killed. He said the fog helped authorities arrest a farmer in the August 2020 rape and murder of Sutherland, but its use was not documented in court records reviewed by the AP. Cyphers, who led the EFF’s public records project, said there has been no previous record of companies selling this kind of granular data directly to local law enforcement. “We’re seeing counties with less than 100,000 people where the sheriff is using this extremely high-tech, extremely invasive, covert surveillance tool to go after local crime,” Cyphers said. One such client is the sheriff’s office in rural North Carolina’s Rockingham County, population 91,000 and just north of Greensboro, where Hall still lives. The county bought a one-year permit for $9,000 last year and recently renewed it. “Rockingham County is small in terms of population. It never ceases to amaze me how small companies will collect tools that they just don’t need and nobody needs that,” Hall said. Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Kevin Suthard confirmed the department recently renewed its license, but declined to offer details about the use of Fog Reveal or how the office protects people’s rights. “Because then it would be less effective as criminals could know we have the device and adjust the way they commit their crimes accordingly. Does that make sense?” said Suthard. Fog has aggressively marketed its tool to police, even beta testing it with law enforcement, records show. The Dallas Police Department purchased a Fog license in February after receiving a free trial and “saw a demonstration and heard success stories from the company,” Senior Cpl. Melinda Gutierrez, a spokeswoman for the department, said in an email. Fog’s tool is accessible through a web portal. Investigators can enter the coordinates of a crime scene into the database, which returns search results showing a device’s Fog ID, which is based on its unique Ad ID number. Police can see what device IDs were found near the crime scene. Detective…
