“Nightmare Scenario”: U.S. Government Has Been Secretly Stockpiling Information on Americans Via Data Brokers
June 15th, 2023I’ll recycle some commentary from, FBI Finally Admits to Buying Location Data on Americans:
In 2013, we learned that law enforcement was “laundering” data collected through U.S. national security intercept systems for use against Americans, U.S. Communications Intelligence Secretly Shared with Law Enforcement for Use Against Americans in Criminal Investigations:
“It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean,” said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.
—
So, this is going to be more about being able to, “Work it backwards to make it clean,” because they already collected it illegally and stored it at the Utah Data Center.
Via: ZeroHedge:
The ODNI’s own panel of advisers makes clear that the government’s static interpretations of what constitutes “publicly available information” poses a significant threat to the public. The advisers decry existing policies that automatically conflate, in the first place, being able to buy information with it being considered “public.” The information being commercially sold about Americans today is “more revealing, available on more people (in bulk), less possible to avoid, and less well understood” than that which is traditionally thought of as being “publicly available.”
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.”
