Dream on !!!
(This is a guest editorial by Emma Pullman, head of shareholder engagement and responsible investment at the British Columbia General Employees’ Union (BCGEU) in Canada, a minority shareholder in Thomson Reuters, and Sarah Lamdan, a lawyer and librarian who researches and writes about library vendors and service providers, and who wrote a 2019 law review article on the legal ethics related to the use of Thomson Reuters’ products by ICE. Their bios are at the end of the editorial.)
Thomson Reuters is one of the world’s largest data corporations, owner of Westlaw, Reuters news service, and the CLEAR investigative platform. As one of the nation’s most significant data brokers, the Toronto-based company sells access to billions of personal data points, drawn from thousands of sources, to insurance companies, financial institutions, and U.S. government agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Scrutiny of the company is now at a peak. Next week, shareholders will vote on a resolution asking Thomson Reuters to commission and publish an independent human rights impact assessment of how its products are used by law enforcement and immigration enforcement agencies. The proposal was filed by the BC General Employees’ Union (BCGEU), a long-time shareholder that has been engaging the company on this issue since 2020, though the company’s relationship with ICE predates that by years.
When ICE began building its “Extreme Vetting” program in 2017, Thomson Reuters signed on to help construct what has become the largest commercial data surveillance infrastructure in the United States. The company has entered into contracts with ICE worth tens of millions of dollars. ICE has described Thomson Reuters’ data services as “mission critical” to its operations and has integrated the company’s data into tools including Motorola’s license plate readers, PenLink’s live location tracking, and Palantir’s software.
Despite this documented record — established through public contract disclosures, extensive investigative reporting, fact-checked books on immigration surveillance, and congressional testimony — Thomson Reuters maintains that it is not providing ICE with surveillance tools. Lawmakers at a congressional hearing on data brokers and the Department of Homeland Security treated the company’s data-sharing arrangements with ICE as established fact. The company’s response has consistently been that critics are “misunderstanding” how its products work.
The scrutiny has not been limited to outsiders. Hundreds of Thomson Reuters employees signed a letter calling for greater transparency. Two employees who raised concerns internally were allegedly terminated, prompting a whistleblower lawsuit and an unfair labor practice complaint.
The company’s position rests on a narrow framing: it provides access to records that are already public, not records requiring a warrant. But this argument confuses the nature of individual data points with the nature of aggregated surveillance. It is also worth asking the obvious question: if Thomson Reuters is simply repackaging freely available public records, why does ICE pay it millions of dollars for the service?
The answer lies in what CLEAR actually does. The platform allows users to retrieve thousands of data points about any individual: current and historical addresses, known associates and family members, vehicle information, employment history, phone numbers, financial records, and location history. It can map social networks: who someone lives with, who they call, who they are connected to. It aggregates data from social media, and according to published reporting, in some cases dating profiles; the kind of intimate personal information shared in contexts people reasonably assume are private.
https://www.lawnext.com/2026/06/guest-editorial-tell-the-whole-truth-thomson-reuters.html
