A new investigation by 404 Media revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a surprising roadmap to tracking you: Your credit cards.
According to the report, when someone opens a new credit card, credit bureaus Equifax and Experian feed their header data to Thomson Reuters, which folds it into CLEAR, an investigative data tool the company sells to law enforcement. ICE then buys access to CLEAR and reportedly plans to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for it, partly to hunt down what the administration calls “voter fraud,” following President Trump’s conspiracy-heavy press conference on election security earlier this month.
From there, the data feeds directly into ELITE, an app built by the Peter Thiel-founded data company Palantir that ICE agents use to decide which neighborhoods to target for raids, generating a “confidence score” on where someone actually lives.
Thomson Reuters denies it allows its data to be used solely for immigration enforcement.
However, investigators at 404 Media worked out this data pipeline “by reviewing U.S. government procurement records and internal documents from companies providing the information,” said the report.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) slammed the practice as an unregulated privacy nightmare that Americans can’t opt out of, noting a Biden-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule meant to close the loophole was killed by the Trump administration last year.
Attorney Laura Rivera added that “The unregulated trade of credit header data hurts all of us, but it especially harms communities that are overpoliced, like Black and Brown people, immigrants, and people seeking reproductive care, enabling stalking, harassment, and even arrest and deportation.”
The post Privacy nightmare unleashed as Trump’s ICE finds ‘unregulated’ way to track people: report appeared first on Raw Story.
