Home Affairs has paid an American intelligence company to access Locate X, a controversial tool that can track the movement of smartphones.
The agency has had access to the product since at least 2021, according to correspondence between Home Affairs and Babel Street obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws.
In 2020, the news outlet Protocol reported that Babel Street’s Locate X “allows investigators to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area, and see where else those devices have travelled, going back months”.
This data is culled from commercially available apps that may collect location information to serve ads and mapping services. The company does not acknowledge the existence of the product on its public website, but does promote its use of “ad tech telemetry data” to “locate and track” persons or groups of interest.
Home Affairs acknowledged using Babel Street technology, but would not discuss details about how it is used or which data sources it has access to.
A spokesperson said it “collects commercially available and publicly available online information where it is necessary to support the department’s and Australian Border Force’s specific functions and activities, and where it is proportionate and in accordance with the law”.
“The department has acquired the minimal amount of Babel Street software that it considers necessary to facilitate the lawful investigation of priority matters.”
Babel Street did not respond to a request for comment.
The use of such products raises questions about how government agencies use commercially available data that may contain sensitive information about Australians, according to Samantha Floreani of Digital Rights Watch.
“There is an appalling lack of transparency about the kinds of surveillance technologies being used by government agencies,” she said. “[They] should not be able to so easily leverage commercial surveillance products without public scrutiny.”
The FoI documents show staff from Home Affairs’ online, geospatial and financial intelligence section sending Babel Street questions about the functionality of Locate X, including why they were seeing “the exact location for a device … on a variety of different days and times” in a residential area.
Staff appeared to be running up against a system warning about “too many devices at location”. Home Affairs also upgraded the tool with “premium” licences, but the documents do not reveal what extra functionalities and data are provided.
The correspondence also revealed staff trialling and in some cases obtaining licences for other Babel Street products, including Babel X, Synthesis and Oasis.
Internal US Customs and Border Protection documents have revealed that Babel X, an open-source monitoring tool, can be used to input information such as a telephone number, email addresses and usernames and return a name, social security number or driver’s licence, social media information and even an IP address and employment history.
According to the Babel Street website, Synthesis is “AI-powered” and offers “automated social network and relationship mapping”. Oasis is an advanced search tool.
In 2021, Home Affairs staff queried the availability of data sources on Synthesis, which at the time appear to have only included Twitter. Staff said they would be interested in “other social media platforms and dark web capability” in the future.
A review of government tenders shows Babel Street has held multiple contracts worth upwards of $5m with Australian government agencies since 2021, including the Department of Defence and the Australian Signals Directorate as well as Home Affairs.
The public-facing contract details do not reveal what products were acquired.
Government use of information from brokers who resell data such as browsing and purchase histories, insurance claims and criminal records – known as “commercially available information” in intelligence parlance – is under growing scrutiny globally.
“Most people would not be comfortable with these agencies directly collecting this kind of scale and scope of data themselves,” Floreani said. “So we shouldn’t be OK with them buying access to it either.”
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