ICE Demands Return of Already-Released Records

Documents released a year ago show private companies resisting surveillance requests

This is a first for us in all of EFF's history of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation—Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has demanded we return records it gave us more than a year ago. The release of these documents doesn't endanger national security or create a risk to an ongoing law enforcement investigation. Instead, it seems that ICE simply wants to stymie further FOIA requests from EFF as we try to get answers about the government's electronic surveillance procedures.

It started a year ago when ICE produced records in response to one of our Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. The records show that companies like Comcast, Cricket Communications, Metro PCS, Southern Linc Wireless, and T-Mobile either pushed back on or failed to comply with specific requests for information on their customers. For example, in response to one of ICE's pen register/trap and trace orders, Southern Linc said it "did not like the wording of [the] order" and "would not give 'real time' ping location for [the] phone, [it] would only give 1 hour old history." ICE also reported that it experienced "technical issues . . . on almost a daily basis" trying to get data on a suspect from Cricket Communications." And Comcast gave ICE the runaround for a month before it turned over IP log history.