Accused, once again, of flouting the law, Big Brother is collecting your location data wholesale, buying it from places like Safegraph and Gravy Analytics. Warrant? They don’t need no steenking warrant, the FBI and all the other alphabet agencies sneer.
Location data for sale to anyone
Big Brother has “amassed huge caches’ of ‘sensitive and intimate‘ data on citizens” by “flouting the law,” privacy advocates warn. Government agencies, New York Post advises, “including the FBI, DHS and NSA have their tentacles deep into U.S. society.”
That’s not a good thing. Since congress is considering driving a stake through the heart of the nefarious Section 702 surveillance tools, our domestic spooks appear to have found a way to get their information elsewhere. It seems that internet tracking companies are peddling their datasets on the street like dope.
Uncle Sam is shelling out big bucks to support his data addiction. Insiders have known about the barely legal overreach for a long time but the report to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was only recently declassified.
NEW: The ACLU of Massachusetts, @reproequity_now, and @PPAdvocacyMA are calling on lawmakers to ban the sale of cellphone location data.#Mapoli pic.twitter.com/ruKfsPhelr
— ACLU Massachusetts (@ACLU_Mass) June 14, 2023
The memo exposes some pretty startling overreach into the lives of ordinary Americans. Anyone who shows up on the radar can be a target. The information is freely available to anyone with the cash and it doesn’t come cheap. Joe Biden just keeps printing more to cover it.
The report, the Post writes, “highlights how a loophole allows intelligence agencies to buy huge troves of data, enabling them to effectively track the phones and locations of millions of Americans without a warrant.” Federal secret police get around oversight and accountability by legally buying “publicly available” information.
To demand access to the location of your cell phone, for instance, the FBI would need a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment. A judge would have to approve the request. In today’s modern society, they can buy your location from several sources, no warrant or any other credentials required.
What we feared most
“This report,” notes Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress, “reveals what we feared most. Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.” The amount of data available is enormous, even the “sensitive and intimate” stuff.
The panel of advisers who prepared the report told the Director of National Intelligence that what the administration is calling “publicly available information” actually “poses a significant threat to the public.” That’s because “the same data the government is buying” could easily be used to “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming” against just about anyone.
Because of outdated policies and the fact nobody really cares what the law says anyway because they can’t read or understand it, information which is already for sale might not really be considered publicly available. Big Brother can buy it anyway.
CDC used the pandemic to track Americans’ location data.
This included whether North Dakotans were going to church or taking their kids to a game.
Emergency or not, infringing on civil liberties is never acceptable. pic.twitter.com/QDCOSv72CR
— Congressman Kelly Armstrong (@RepArmstrongND) June 7, 2023
According to the report, “the huge datasets for purchase today are ‘more revealing, available on more people, less possible to avoid, and less well understood‘ than previously.” Anything the government can buy “can also be purchased by other companies” which means the data can “potentially be exploited” by nearly anyone.
The internet powers that be assure everyone that all the datasets are “anonymized” but that’s misleading. Sure, they have “the identifying information of individuals stripped” away. They’ll report only “sex, age and location of a person rather than overt data such as names or phone numbers.” There’s a little snag with that.
“However, the report to the ODNI noted how it is relatively easy to ‘to de-anonymize and identify individuals,’ especially if a number of data points are cross referenced, giving an example of how it could be possible to identify a group of people who attended a protest ‘based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.‘“
