Ambrogi published the following on Linked in
May 31 will bring the expiration of Thomson Reuters’ contract to provide ICE with surveillance data on large portions of the U.S. population. It is not yet known whether the contract will be renewed, but some of the company’s own employees and shareholders, along with civil liberties advocates, are pushing for it not to be.
For most lawyers and legal professionals, Westlaw and LexisNexis are familiar tools of the trade, ones they may use virtually every day. But less familiar is what their corporate parents do on the side – sell vast quantities of personal data to ICE.
Three flagship contracts with ICE – two with Thomson Reuters for its CLEAR product and one with LexisNexis for its Accurint product – have funneled roughly $51.6 million into surveillance tools that aggregate billions of data points on hundreds of millions of Americans.
At a time when ICE’s tactics raise serious questions about civil liberties and the rule of law, I decided to dig in and learn more about how Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis support ICE’s activities.
The result is a two-part series on LawNext. In part one, whicih I have published today, I examine the contracts themselves – what CLEAR and Accurint actually do, the Fourth Amendment questions they raise, the AI layer now sitting on top of them, and how this data feeds into analytics, tracking and targeting.
In part two, which I’ll publish tomorrow, I’ll look at the pushback, including the 200 Thomson Reuters employees who signed an open letter, the Law360 journalists who did the same, a minority shareholder’s six-year opposition campaign, and the whistleblower case filed this month by a former Thomson Reuters attorney-editor who says the company fired her for organizing the protest letter.
I also return to a seminal 2019 analysis on what all of this means for lawyers’ ethical obligations to their clients.
Every lawyer who pays for a Westlaw or LexisNexis subscription contributes, however indirectly, to the revenue of companies that build surveillance tools for immigration enforcement. Whether the profession treats that as someone else’s problem is the question the May 31 deadline now puts squarely on the table.
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