(The Center Square) – Georgia child protective services has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on technologies that secretly track cell phone movements and surveil web activity—tools the agency might be prohibited from using, records obtained by The Center Square show.
Four police-grade investigative products have cost taxpayers at least $639,000 over the past two years, according to a stack of invoices and purchase orders, all while debate rages on whether the department is even legally authorized to use such surveillance techniques.
“It just appears to me that the commissioner is proceeding with her own interpretation of the law,” state Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, a Decatur Democrat and a member of the House Judiciary Juvenile and Appropriations committees, told The Center Square. “It’s simply not clear to me that she has the legal authority to use law enforcement, invasive monitoring technology, or to have an independent law enforcement agency doing criminal investigations.”
Department of Human Services Commissioner Candice Broce declined an interview request. But an internal email obtained by The Center Square, as well as public statements by Broce, strongly suggest the technologies are being used to track down runaway foster children and rescue them from sex traffickers.
The revelation that child welfare wields some of the same high-tech tools used by police and federal agents caught some lawmakers by surprise. Republican state Rep. Beth Camp, who chairs the Judiciary Juvenile Committee, said she is “100% not OK with that,” and after speaking with The Center Square announced she’s drafting new legislation to beef up transparency in how Human Services spends funds.
“I am shocked,” Camp said in an interview. “I hope to goodness it’s not being used for anybody else. I have a public office at the Capitol. What’s stopping anyone from using any of this software against me—who’s sitting in my office, what we’re talking about, emails that have gone back and forth?”
Human Services oversees the Division of Family and Children Services, or DFCS, which is a social services agency under Georgia law, not law enforcement. Most of the division’s investigative work is shielded from public view by state and federal laws protecting children’s and families’ privacy.
So if any abuses did occur with monitoring tech, whether the public would ever find out is “in a murky area,” Rep. Oliver said. Under Georgia law, DFCS case files are typically only released when a child dies in state custody, and only in highly-redacted form.
It’s also not clear if the department legally needs a judge to issue a search warrant before it can track a juvenile’s phone or online activity, or track an adult suspected of abusing them.
Melissa Carter, a professor at Emory University School of Law, said such sophisticated surveillance conducted by child welfare could run up against the Fourth Amendment—the constitutional protection against illegal search and seizures.
“Can a youth refuse? Is consent required? Is a warrant required?” Carter, the executive director of Emory’s Barton Child Law and Policy Center, which protects the rights of children involved in the state legal system, said in an interview. “Who’s seeing this data that’s being collected and how long is it retained? It just opens up this just endless set of unanswered questions, all of which have legal implications for the privacy of that child or that family.”
But not everyone is necessarily opposed to child welfare using technology to track down runaways.
“If that is a necessary part of finding missing kids that are in state custody, I personally don’t have a big problem with that,” State Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, who chairs the Senate Children and Families Committee, told The Center Square, “provided it’s operating within the legal framework of all state and federal laws.”
The SVU mission
Commissioner Broce told lawmakers during a February 2025 Juvenile Judiciary hearing that she formed a Special Victims Unit within her department “to work with Georgia law enforcement to better serve Georgia’s most marginalized children.” She spoke of a girl who’d been trafficked across state lines by a truck driver and gang raped at gunpoint. She told of teens working as strippers in adult entertainment, being sexually exploited at underground house parties, or showing up in online ads for sex services.
Manipulated and controlled through drugs, many of them don’t want to be rescued, the commissioner explained.
“Many children do not identify as trafficking victims ever,” Broce told the committee. “Many leave their placements and return to their abusers, and they do not view them as abusers.”
Broce described investigators in her department using social media handles, cell phone numbers, email addresses, known associates, and links to online sex ads to conduct sting operations and recoveries that—in cooperation with law enforcement—located dozens of children, some of whom hadn’t previously been in state custody.
Broce also pointed out that two SVU team members are deputized. The Center Square verified that two Human Services employees have been deputized by the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, north of Atlanta. A third, the unit’s director, Hunter Llewellyn, had his deputization revoked after a DUI arrest in another county, Cherokee Sheriff’s Capt. Jay Baker said in an email.
Llewellyn did not respond to a message from The Center Square.
Law enforcement powers?
The day after that 2025 hearing, the General Assembly’s Office of Legislative Counsel handed Rep. Oliver a legal opinion that raised doubts about whether child welfare can take on such police duties as “executing exigency warrants for IP addresses, social media handles, and electronic devices; pinging cellphones; and conducting forensic interviews.”
The purchased technologies discovered by The Center Square are capable of going further, according to descriptions on the companies’ websites and information provided by Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and technologist with Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit concerned with civil liberties and privacy in the digital world.
The technologies are:
- ShadowDragon, at a cost to taxpayers of $219,195 according to records obtained by The Center Square, scans social media, web forums, gaming platforms, the dark web and other online sources to link social media identities together, establish networks and monitor online activity.
- Anomaly Six, which was bundled into the $219,195 in invoices for ShadowDragon, sells bulk smartphone geolocation data, using pings from smartphone apps to follow phone movements in near real-time.
- Cellebrite, costing the state at least $75,738, can forensically extract the contents of a locked cell phone by physically plugging into it, then copying text messages, app messages, call histories, location history, contacts, photos and other files.
- Traffic Jam, accounting for $344,074 of the spending records, scans and analyzes online commercial sex advertisements, using facial recognition to match images against photos of missing persons and mapping criminal networks through shared phone numbers and emails.
The invoices include purchases, renewals and training.
Fourth Amendment concerns
Quintin said while everyone wants to save trafficked children, there’s a potential for abuse. The Anomaly Six geolocation tool, for example, could conceivably track the patterns of people who are only in the vicinity of suspected sex trafficking, such as someone staying in the same hotel, he said. This year’s Chatrie decision by the U.S. Supreme Court held people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to cell phone movements, and acquiring location history from a third-party company constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.
“My concern is that there’s no oversight for this organization,” he said. “This is as close as you can get to being able to read someone’s mind, and to do that without a warrant is something that most people would think is unconstitutional.”
The legal opinion, by Assistant Legislative Counsel Kristin Harripaul, said “we have found no express statutory authorization for DFCS to exercise police powers,” but cautioned that the department could find justification in other language that broadly defines law enforcement as any agency involved in preserving public order or “prevention, detection or investigation of a crime.”
“Throughout the code, references to DFCS and law enforcement generally employ language describing DFCS as assisting, collaborating with, or bringing problems to the attention of law enforcement, as opposed to directing or controlling law enforcement activities,” the opinion said.
An internal Human Services email, obtained by The Center Square through an Open Records Act request, shows Llewellyn, the SVU’s chief, announcing more aggressive law enforcement tactics in missing child cases.
“Effective immediately,” the August 2025 email says. “If there is any investigation requiring a forensic interview and local agencies are not willing to take the case, then we will be the primary investigating agency for the purposes of (a forensic interview)/phone dump/evidence gathering.”
The email is addressed to “SVU Team.” Llewellyn’s title in the signature is “Director, Law Enforcement Investigations.”
Llewellyn also said, “The phones we collect will be able to be dumped in house within the next few weeks … Once (a forensic interview) is conducted or evidence (text messages/ads/social media exchanges) is collected showing a crime, the appropriate jurisdiction will be notified and a case file containing everything that we have will be packaged and given to them.”
Lawmakers react
For lawmakers, the news that Human Services purchased $639,000 in surveillance and monitoring technology comes after years of debate over whether child welfare can legally take on law enforcement functions. And it came six months after the state legislature plugged a massive budget shortfall in the department with $81 million.
Rep. Camp, who’s drafting the transparency legislation, said that before speaking with a reporter she had already caught wind of the ShadowDragon purchase but had difficulty getting answers out of the department.
“I can’t even get an invoice, so do you honestly think I’m going to know if they’re appropriately using surveillance equipment?” she told The Center Square.
Rep. Charlice Byrd, a Republican from Woodstock, said she supports Human Services SVU using the high-tech tools, but cautiously. She said she’s concerned about Flock cameras, but when it comes to DFCS, she has a nuanced view from sitting on the board of North Georgia Angel House, a Cherokee County transitional home for girls in the foster system.
Byrd said she’s well aware they can be lured away by sex traffickers, as well as the need for supervising adults to sometimes go through teenagers’ phones. So she’s on board with the technology “if it has to do with strictly foster children.”
“Not where they are doing this to any and everybody’s telephones across the state of Georgia,” Byrd said. “No, definitely not.”
