It's Your Week: How police can access your cellphone data

This FBI program you've probably never heard of could be monitoring you on social media right now. And if your phone is nearby, Google probably knows exactly where you are and can relay that information to the police. 

Now that we all feel comfortable and definitely not as if we're being watched, hi! I'm Sallee Ann, and welcome to Your Week, our newsletter exclusively for Paste BN subscribers.

This week we look at two investigations into how authorities can look into all of our data. It keeps us safe, but is it also dangerous?

Before we dive in, don't miss these stories made possible with your subscription:

• Many US prisons don't have full AC. Climate change is making it "torture."
• The complexity of mourning Queen Elizabeth II and questioning her legacy
• 'I watched life leave his eyes': Parents warn against metal straws after 4-year-old is stabbed in the throat
• People die summiting 14,000-foot mountain peaks. These climbers do it anyway.

Yes, an FBI agent may be reading your tweets

Reporter Will Carless has been covering extremism for years and he said he had never heard the acronym SOMEX before until a few weeks ago in an arrest warrant.

“The discovery the FBI had a ‘Social Media Exploitation Team’ was anathema to everything I had previously understood about the federal government’s relationship with the First Amendment and law enforcement’s authority to monitor Americans’ social media accounts,” Carless said. “It also appeared to completely contradict what top FBI officials had told Congress in the wake of Jan. 6 about what they could and could not do to monitor social media.”

SOMEX, known as Social Media Exploitation, was created to assist in identifying “unknown subject, victim, or location information” and allows FBI agents to look at essentially anything online, proactively, if the intent is to stop a crime or to keep Americans safe. 

Top FBI leaders have sought to downplay the extent to which the bureau can legally monitor public online activities.

But in reality, the FBI can conduct almost unlimited monitoring of social media for law enforcement purposes, officials acknowledged to Paste BN. 

“What I found interesting is that what the FBI is doing here is looking at information that is publicly available, much like you or I might do on social media. So, what’s the big deal? I mean, if they weren’t, the public would probably fault them for not doing so,” said reporter Tami Abdollah. “But what is equally easy to forget is that there’s an inherent tension between law enforcement activity and First Amendment-protected activity.”

Maybe you’ve posted on social media an inside joke that’s a little distasteful but not with any real motive beyond being funny with friends. Abdollah said FBI agents, with little to no oversight, could misread those inside jokes ​​and use them as a basis to keep an eye on you, or even as the necessary predicate for opening a more serious, and intrusive, investigation that ends in your arrest. 

And it’s not just the FBI. There’s a Department of Homeland Security team, local task forces, plus dozens of fusion centers across the U.S. that help coordinate the sharing of intelligence with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. In addition to these entities, the monitoring effort includes many contractors that can also scour social media, at far greater, and more automated, lengths. 

Supporters of the effort, Abdollah said, have talked about public postings on social media as the digital equivalent of someone yelling or posting things on the town square.

“But the reality is that there are implicit biases and questionable disparities regarding the real-world effort, so why not the digital one?” Abdollah said.

Abdollah and Carless said there’s still much to be learned about SOMEX and other social media surveillance, so there will be more investigations in the months and years to come.

“There’s a lot we still don’t know about SOMEX, and a lot more we learned while working on this story,” Abdollah said. “But at the very base level, it felt important to inform the public about this ongoing, secretive effort to review social media by government agents who are both empowered to keep you safe and able to forever alter your life.”

Yes, Google knows where you are and can tell police

You also don’t have to post anything on social media for your information to be used in an investigation. Police are increasingly using cellphone data and geofencing technology. That means if you’re a Google user and have location history services enabled on your device, Google can access your location down to mere feet.

And when Google receives a geofence warrant from police, the company runs through an internal three-step procedure. First, it usually turns over a list of devices with timestamps indicating that they were in the area at the time. Police then review the list and narrow it down. The list is de-identified until Google determines police have narrowed their request sufficiently and it can provide the names and emails associated with specific accounts and devices. 

“We sought to shed light on this little-known world of police warrants pushing the boundaries of privacy and tech,” said reporter Nick Penzenstadler. “Google retains hundreds of millions of records in databases of users worldwide, down to about 10 feet. They processed more than 40,000 search warrants from U.S. police recently – and more than a quarter are about these location history geofences.”

Penzenstadler said this is one of those stories that takes months to unravel. More than 200 search warrants were obtained to help understand the process.

“Privacy advocates worry the virtual dragnet by its nature scoops up millions of innocent people into police investigations,” Penzenstadler said. “But our story shows it’s solving at least some crimes – and the victim’s families are thankful when it gets results.”

The lead anecdote in the investigation focuses on bicyclist Pamela Morehouse, who died after a hit-and-run in Crescent City, California, in 2018. Her case had gone cold because of lack of evidence. That was before local officials learned about and used geofencing technology.

“We connected with Morehouse’s brother. He assumed his sister’s hit-and-run would never be solved,” Penzenstadler said. “We informed him that a suspect had been arrested and was heading to court this fall.”

Yes, we had a birthday this week!

Paste BN celebrated 40 years of being the nation's newspaper on Thursday. I heard so many wonderful memories from subscribers in our texting campaign. Joseph F. shared he walked several blocks as a teenager to buy the first issue. Dayna D. said she was in her senior year of journalism school in 1982 and wrote a paper on whether a national paper would be sustainable. (She said yes!) And Nancy C. remembers getting a free copy of the inaugural edition in Evanston, Illinois.

And yes, we have a subscriber-only texting campaign just for you. Texts are included in your subscription. Sign up here!

Whether you've been a subscriber from the very beginning or just this week, we thank you for making our journalism possible. Here's to another 40 years together!