The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud, according to procurement documents reviewed by 404 Media. The document says Thomson Reuters is able to let ICE continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest.
The news comes after President Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference
about election security on Thursday
, setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections. It also follows
ICE fatally shooting 2 people
in a week.
“Due to ICE’s re-prioritized mission, there is need for this data to be readily accessible to support the presidential mandate of the identification of Voters Fraud, Immigration Fraud and National Security,”
the procurement document reads
. “This data specifically validates and verifies school, benefit, immigration and other eligibility requirements.”
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Do you work at Thomson Reuters? Do you know about any other data sales like this? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
Thomson Reuters is most well known for running the Reuters news agency, but the company is also a massive data broker and sells access to that data to companies and governments. Its data product, called CLEAR, promises to “Accelerate investigations confidently through a vast collection of public and proprietary records,”
according to Thomson Reuters’ website
.
Thomson Reuters lists some of the data sources that feed into CLEAR, and 404 Media has obtained an internal list. It includes
credit header data
, which is the personal information so
… [more]
