1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Absolutely nothing has changed post-Snowden other
than the continual growth and advancement of total
spyveillance and control systems raping the freedom
of humankind. History shows that, on the whole, nothing
other than revolt stops the abusive GovCorp State.

"Nightmare Scenario": US Government Has Been Secretly Stockpiling Dirt
On Americans Via Data Brokers

https://www.wired.com/story/odni-commercially-available-information-report/
https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-section-702/

The US Government has been purchasing troves of information on
American citizens from 3rd party data providers, according to Wired,
which cites privacy advocates who say this constitutes a "nightmare
scenario."

    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. -Wired

"This report reveals what we feared most," according to attorney Sean
Vitka of the Demand Progress nonprofit. "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 government has been using 'craven interpretations of aging laws'
to bypass privacy rights, as prosecutors have increasingly ignored
limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance.

"I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an
American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights,
then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will
crumble," according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

During a March 8 hearing, Wyden pressed Haines to release the panel's
report - after Haines said it should "absolutely" be read by the
public. On Friday, that's exactly what happened after the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released it amid a battle
with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) over various
related documents.

"This report makes it clear that the government continues to think it
can buy its way out of constitutional protections using taxpayers’ own
money," said EPIC law fellow, Chris Baumohl. "Congress must tackle the
government’s data broker pipeline this year, before it considers any
reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act," he said (referring to the ongoing political fight
over the so-called “crown jewel” of US surveillance, per Wired).

    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.” -Wired

What's more, the report notes that it's relatively easy to
"deanonymize and identify individuals" based on data that was
originally been anonymized prior to its commercial sale. According to
the report, the data can do things like "identify every person who
attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or
ad-tracking records," posing serious civil liberty concerns over how
"large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in
sensitive aggregations."

The report goes on to say that in times past, access to sensitive
information about a person was part of a "targeted" and "predicated"
investigation. That's no longer the case.

"Today, 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," it reads, adding that both the
"volume and sensitivity" of information available for the government
to purchase has exploded in recent years thanks to "location-tracking
and other features of smartphones" as well as the "advertising-based
monetization model" that underpins much of the internet.

According to the ODNI, this data "in the wrong hands" could be used
against Americans "facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and
public shaming" - all offenses that have been committed by
intelligence agencies and the White House in the past.

"The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of
people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all
times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep
flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones,
connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and
other innovations have had this effect without government
participation," reads the report.

Read the report below: