Privacy International's Open Letter to Thomas Reuters CLEAR Database

According to Medium (June 21, 2018): Documents show that ICE currently has contract with West Publishing Corporation, a Thomson Reuters subsidiary, providing it with access to the Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting (CLEAR) system as part of a contract value worth over $20 million.

The CLEAR system allows ICE access to a “vast collection of public and proprietary records” including phone records, consumer and credit bureau data, healthcare provider content, utilities data, DMV records, World-Check listing, business data, data from social networks and chatrooms, and “live access to more than 7 billion license plate detections”.

With Thomson Reuters Special Services providing ICE’s Detention Compliance and Removal office with “subscription data services”. The contract is worth over $6.7 million and was signed in February 2018. Other documentation specifies that the contract is for a “continuous monitoring and alert system to track 500,000 identities per month” which is “able to securely process and return aliens’ information and addresses using the following types of specified data: FBI numbers; State Identification Numbers; real time jail booking data; credit history; insurance claims; phone number account information; wireless phone accounts; wire transfer data; driver’s license information; vehicle registration information; property information; pay day loan information; public court records; incarceration data; employment address data; Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) data; and employer records.”

Privacy International (PI) has today sent an open letter to the President of Thomson Reuters Corporation asking whether he will commit to ensuring the multinational company’s products or services are not used to enforce cruel, arbitrary, and disproportionate measures, including those currently being implemented by US immigration authorities.
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CLEAR is a records aggregator, similar to TLO and LexisNexis Accurint. These companies gather data and records from a large number of public and semi-public sources and consolidate those data and records into searchable databases.

While these databases are useful investigative tools for law enforcement, they are not magic. What these databases do however is pull together large amount of information about hundreds of millions of individuals that can be accessed by law enforcement and other government employees without the need for a warrant, and without any requirement for notification to the individual whose information is accessed. 
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