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A newly declassified government report confirms for the first time that U.S. intelligence and spy agencies purchase vast amounts of commercially available information on Americans, including data from connected vehicles, web browsing data, and smartphones.
By the U.S. government's own admission, the data it purchases "clearly provides intelligence value," but also "raises significant issues related to privacy and civil liberties."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declassified and released the January 2022-dated report on Friday, following a request by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) to disclose how the intelligence community uses commercially available data. This kind of data is generated from internet-connected devices and made available by data brokers for purchase, such as phone apps and vehicles that collect granular location data and web browsing data that tracks users as they browse the internet.
They don't? What about budgets? That just goes into a black hole labeled "Miscellaneous Spending"?Quote:
The declassified report is the U.S. government's first public disclosure revealing the risks associated with commercially available data of Americans that can be readily purchased by anyone, including adversaries and hostile nations. The United States does not have a privacy or data protection law governing the sharing or selling of Americans' private information.
"In a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, [commercially available information] includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained" by other intelligence gathering capabilities, such as search warrants, wiretaps and surveillance, the report says.
In a statement following the report's publication, Wyden said: "This review shows the government's existing policies have failed to provide essential safeguards for Americans' privacy, or oversight of how agencies buy and use personal data."
"According to this report, the ODNI does not even know which federal intelligence agencies are buying Americans' personal data," Wyden added.
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Government agencies must typically secure a court-approved warrant to obtain Americans' private data directly from a phone or tech company, such as private messages. But the ODNI's report states that in the cases where Americans' information like location data is openly for sale to the general public, U.S. intelligence agencies can purchase it. (Though, this theory has yet to be scrutinized in federal court.)
Although this data is generally sold in bulk often millions of data points at a time the ODNI's report warns that commercially available data can be easily deanonymized to identify individuals, including Americans. Location data, for example, can be used to infer where people live and work, based on where their phones and vehicles are at certain times of the day.
Commercially available information can also reveal "the detailed movements and associations of individuals and groups, revealing political, religious, travel, and speech activities," the report says, such as being used to "identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records."
Cue Bill Barr: It's just all Uber drivers and taxi cabs. Nothing to see here.