The Arizona Attorney General's Office has obtained the personal information of millions of people who use wire transfer services between Southwestern states and Mexico.
The American Civil Liberties Union shared hundreds of pages of public records Wednesday as evidence that the Arizona Attorney General's Office's program is violating the privacy of people who use these services.
Letters sent by AG's office since 2014 compelled multiple money transfer companies to provide data on transactions involving sums of $500 or more. Some of the personal information contained in the data include the sender's social security number, address, occupation, and date of birth.
The ACLU says the U.S. customers of these services are mostly people who don't have good access to traditional banks.
"That's poor people. That's often immigrants. Members of communities of color," said Nathan Freed Wessler, Deputy Director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "So you have government agencies here especially preying on the data of communities that have some of the least ability to defend themselves."
Arizona anti-racketeering law does allow for financial data to be collected in criminal investigations, and Arizona's new attorney general, Kris Mayes, gave no indication she's willing to end the wire transfer data collection. Her office issued the following statement:
"This program has been an effective tool in fighting money laundering, sex trafficking, and drug trafficking cases, among others for over a decade. Courts have held that customers using money transmitter businesses do not have the same expectation of privacy as traditional banking customers. While Attorney General Mayes values privacy, she will continue to utilize this tool to protect the people of Arizona."
The ACLU claims the AG's subpoenas are "illegal" because they cast too wide a net.
The AG's office gathered records from numerous wire transfer companies for customers in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas who either send or receive money from Mexico. The ACLU says data on at least 145 million transactions has been obtained.
Wessler described the AG's efforts as "a fishing expedition, just sucking up as many records as possible, and it's violating people's privacy rights in the process."
Other U.S. police agencies can access customer data, which is shared through a non-profit organization known as TRAC. The US Department of Homeland Security is also involved.
"DHS paid for a big part of the budget of this program that created this giant database that they have been putting records in, and they've been taking records out," Wessler said. "There's very little information available to the public now about what kinds of investigations these records have been used in."
US Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter Wednesday to the Department of Justice calling for a federal investigation to see if DHS's involvement with mass wire transfer records collection is consistent with "policy, federal law, and the constitution."
