Wyden, Warren Ask TIGTA to Investigate IRS Use of Phone Data

Wyden, Warren Call for Investigation of IRS Location Tracking Surveillance Program

September 24, 2020

Washington, D.C. — U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., today requested an inspector general investigation of the Internal Revenue Service's use of a commercial location tracking service without a court order, after agency officials confirmed the existence of the program this summer.

The IRS criminal investigations unit (IRS-CI) paid for access to a commercial surveillance database containing location data from millions of Americans' mobile phones. In a call with Senate staff, IRS officials confirmed they used the product, offered by Venntel Inc., to search for information about Americans' phones without a court order and had received approval to do so from the agency's lawyers.

“The IRS is not above the law and the agency's lawyers should never provide IRS-CI investigators with permission to bypass the courts and engage in warrantless surveillance of Americans,” Wyden and Warren wrote to the IRS Inspector General. “Accordingly, we urge you to investigate IRS-CI's use of commercial databases containing Americans' information, including but not limited to Venntel's location database.”

The IRS subscribed to the Venntel database in 2017 and 2018, according to agency officials. However, it has failed to respond to multiple Senate requests for legal analysis or other justifications for the IRS use of powerful tracking technology without a court order, in clear violation of Americans' privacy rights protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The full letter to the inspector general is available here.

Wyden and Warren have spent months probing data brokers' sale of Americans' location data, including at Constitutionally protected protests, and its use by the government without court orders. The senators partnered with the House Oversight And Government Reform Committee to question Venntel's practices earlier this year.

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September 24, 2020

The Honorable J. Russell George
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration
1401 H Street, NW
Suite 469
Washington, DC 20005

Dear Mr. George:

We write to ask you to investigate the warrantless tracking of Americans' phones by the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation unit (IRS-CI).

Between 2017 and 2018, IRS-CI paid for a subscription to a commercial database provided by a government contractor named Venntel, containing location data collected from millions of Americans' mobile phones. In a June 2020 oversight call, IRS-CI officials confirmed their purchase of a Venntel subscription and their use of the product, without a court order, in order to track and identify Americans.

In 2018, the Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the collection of significant quantities of historical location data from Americans' cell phones is a search under the Fourth Amendment and therefore requires a warrant. In the decade prior to the Carpenter decision, lower courts had been divided on the question of the type of court order necessary for the government to obtain location data from Americans' phones. The Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that a lesser court order, based upon a reasonable suspicion standard, was sufficient, while privacy advocates argued, and some courts held, that surveillance of historical location data required a probable cause warrant. However, even DOJ did not attempt to argue that government officials could have unfettered access to location data without any kind of court order.

In contrast, IRS-CI officials confirmed that they searched Venntel's location database for information collected from Americans' phones without any kind of court order and that this practice had been approved by IRS lawyers. In the months since the briefing, the IRS has ignored multiple follow-up requests for documentation detailing the legal analysis that supported the IRS' outrageous interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.

The IRS is not above the law and the agency's lawyers should never provide IRS-CI investigators with permission to bypass the courts and engage in warrantless surveillance of Americans. Accordingly, we urge you to investigate IRS-CI's use of commercial databases containing Americans' information, including but not limited to Venntel's location database. We also urge you to examine the legal analysis that IRS lawyers performed in order to determine how such an obvious violation of Americans' privacy rights was approved.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter

Sincerely,

Ron Wyden
United States Senator

Elizabeth Warren
United States Senator