US Border Protection implements system for determining the location of Americans by geolocation of smartphones

In mid-November 2023, it became known that the US Border Customs Service (USCBP) entered into a cooperation agreement with the American data broker LexisNexis. This company provides USCBP with services to organize mass surveillance of citizens, including determining the location of Americans by geolocation of smartphones.

The contract amount is $15.9 million. LexisNexis provides USCBP with access to various U.S. residents' personal data databases that contain both public and confidential information. In addition, USCBP received various services at its disposal. These are, in particular, social media monitoring tools and facial recognition tools, a system for tracking call history through mobile phones, etc. The information can be visualized through Google's mapping service, which allows you to identify and analyze connections between people and organizations.

USCBP enters into cooperation agreement with US data broker LexisNexis

It is noted that under the agreement, USCBP requested LexisNexis to organize access to the Babel X platform, which can associate social security numbers with phone numbers and profiles on social networks, as well as with location data. In addition, Babel X makes it possible to search social network sites for certain parameters, for example, for a geographical region.

In general, the services provided allow USCBP to collect huge amounts of information about Americans. Experts say the agreement with LexisNexis provides the department with "the most aggressive and extensive set of surveillance tools it has ever used." Moreover, the services provided are not limited to the territory of the United States: it is said that the Border Customs Service requests information about telephone numbers and enterprises in Canada and Mexico.^[1]

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