"The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago.
The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members."
I thought that this was timely and relevant. Does federalization/decentralization solve these issues as we go into Web3? I’m newer to these ideas.
Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.”
Basically, they’re buying the profiles corporations already have on you. It isn’t just to sell you pasta sauce; your shoppers’ card also helps build a government profile on you.
Yeah, exactly this. While I’m somewhat uneasy that a huge corporation has a bunch of data on me the most they can do with it is spam me. When the government has the same data their power is orders of magnitude greater and who knows how what you may have said 10 years ago can be used against you now.
There is a reason they’re not allowed to have this data without a warrant. Just because this data is for sale doesn’t mean they suddenly have the right to it. The power of the government is too great to trust with this, and we all know it, which is why those protections exist in the first place.
IMO, this is also a reminder, however, that the US needs better privacy laws in general. It won’t always be just to spam you.
Think about your buying habits and consider whether they might be useful to, say, an insurance broker.
There have been a few stories about some companies getting punished for not going along with this plan of selling this private information. Like I think Qwest for example. This was over a decade ago, so I don’t remember all the details that clearly.
IIRC, Qwest was punished for demanding a warrant.
Such data may be useful, it says, to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.” Such civil liberties concerns are prime examples of how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.” What’s more, information collected for one purpose “may be reused for other purposes,” which may “raise risks beyond those originally calculated,” an effect called “mission creep.”
Terrifying. Thank you for posting.
I agree. Thanks for posting. This is very, very concerning.
Why the fuck is everyone acting like this is new information. Did people forget Edward Snowden. US government loves spying on and will do whatever it takes to spy on you harder. Your so called rights are a sham. The US government will ignore them when it’s convenient for them
My favorite are the people that willingly voted for or support the Patriot Act get mad about the “Twitter Files” and other govt overreach…
Like no shit you guys invited this type of stuff in.
Can’t the government be taken to court for breaking the constitution?
Probably the interpretation of “reasonable expectations of privacy” doesn’t apply to stuff you do online in the same way it applies to stuff you do in your house with curtains drawn… bc the constitution is an out-of-date document
or within earshot of the microphone on your phone…
by who, though? Itself?
If I read it right: the government is paying for commercial (phone) location data. There are 3 issues:
- creepy: the government shouldn’t have this
- costly: they are buying it with our tax dollars
- comprehensive (?): They are getting everything (money can buy)?
If the government were to require this (like via a search warrant) rather than pay for it it would go through a mountain of legal oversight. It seems like the interpretation is: commercially available = publically available.
I guess what I would want to know next is: who gets access to this?
I imagine this goes way deeper. Like google data collection is practically a US gov branch, but the gov is not just passive. I bet Intel ME (wiki) and AMD’s PSP (wiki) are both built with several back doors. I think it is also the reason there are no modern open hardware network chips since this same era that x86 went to these second generation management systems and total black box proprietary microcode for processor initialization. I doubt ARM is any better, but I am probably cynical too. Hopefully RiscV can create a new era of open hardware to dislodge x86/ARM, and someone will displace Broadcom/Qualcomm/Realtek.
The US since 9/11 has been very nearly the train wreck the event intended. Lost freedom, lost wars, lost middle class, school kids in a constant war zone, religious zealotry, political division, u/spez; sounds a lot like the goals of the attackers as I remember the news reporting.
This should come as a shock to basically no one. Did everyone forget they were spliced directly into AT&T’s fiber sucking up everything they wanted during the Bush administration? Of course they’re buying this legally available for sale information.
Not related to fediverse, just a general common sense of data collection: And website/service that does not require registration(openly viewable) or with free account(low entry barrier) you should not post any personal info there even if you say, used a vpn, cause they are free to crawl with bots. That means, don’t “ever” register for porn websites(I don’t get why people would ever do that, that’s beyond me), don’t click stuff without tab/sm container(cause the hidden auth token used by social media website can actually track you), and to some extend, if you truly want to also hide your pattern(regularly used phrase, grammar error, typo etc that can be used to build a profile out to identify you), run a local AI or spell checker that auto fix your post and rephrase sentences for you.
It’s pretty simple really, just don’t post anything and think twice before you post something on publicly available forum/social media.
Really great practices I know I need to be practicing more regularly. Thanks for the reminder.
Excellent advice
Back home it was sometimes speculated that the invasiveness of background checks was to gather dirt on the subjects to hold over them, just in case.
As for federation/decentralization/whatever, it doesn’t solve the mass collection issues at all. We already know how and where they do it (contracting with providers of all kinds and monitoring at IXPs). Unless we get off the Net entirely, there’s no way to stop it.
So they can blackmail us all. Interesting. Also, I will now pat myself on the back for having never taken a nude selfie.
I should take one just to punish my FBI guy 😤
That’s a little more than horrifying, what the hell???
also, I’m too sure if it solves the problem, but it might make it a bit harder to fully connect identities together.
its never stopped, people for some reason think snowden caused it all to stop, it did nothing but change the rules they operate by.
