Now, that hubris and greed is swinging back around to bite us on the ass as the country’s authoritarian movement aims to exploit the dysfunction created.
Article 1 Spencer Ackerman writing in ForeverWars
"This Is About The Way The WORLD Is About To BE…"
Issue 2 of the critically-acclaimed WALLER VS. WILDSTORM is on sale at comic stores everywhere.
- A good spy story, to me, doesn't just depend on a clash of interests. It's a clash of perceptions, a clash of narratives.
- Heightening the stakes for Amanda—building the Wall, if you'll indulge me—required us to show you how astronomically high those stakes are for the other characters. We enter issue 2 filtered through those perceptions.
- By the time we end it, we'll have a much different understanding of how high the stakes are for Amanda, for Jackson, for the rest of the cast, and for America and the world in the late 20th and early 21st century. . .
- That's an admission that they've been violating the Constitution since 2018, at least concerning device location data, although I didn't see many news outlets report it that way. (Shout out to Zach Whittaker of TechCrunch and Dell Cameron of WIRED, who are exceptions.)
- Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime member of the Senate intelligence committee, correctly characterizes this policy as an "end run" around the Fourth Amendment. They have so many!
- The report from an intelligence advisory group, disclosed on Monday afternoon, concedes that this highly detailed personal information, extracted and then arbitraged as a matter of course under surveillance capitalism, can't really be considered the same as open-source data.
- We're talking about information like browsing and search history, "credit histories, insurance claims, criminal records, employment histories, incomes, ethnicities, purchase histories, and interests," to say nothing of device-location or location-revealing information, which we'll turn to in a second. "Profound changes in the scope and sensitivity" of the data that's available for purchase renders it "very different in degree and in kind" than traditional publicly available information that the intelligence agencies consider themselves free to collect. And you don't have to be an intelligence agency to de-anonymize that information. [You might even be a hard-right Catholic blog that hates gay people.—Sam.]
Ominously, the report notes that the "IC cannot understand and improve how it deals with CAI [commercially available information] unless and until it knows what it is doing with CAI," suggesting that right now it, uh, doesn't. Or that the agencies aren't being candid with the DNI advisory group.
Indeed, the report confirms that various U.S. intelligence agencies have paid data brokers for your data for years. The Department of Homeland Security's intelligence shop—yeah, that one—buys information from Thomson Reuters' CLEAR database that "often [has] current location and contact information." And here's an admission from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the Government Accountability Office in 2021, three years after Carpenter:
- DIA currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones.
- The data DIA receives is global in scope and is not identified as “U.S. location data” or “foreign location data” by the vendor at the time it is provisioned to DIA.
- DIA processes the location data as it arrives to identify U.S. location data points that it segregates in a separate database. DIA personnel can only query the U.S. location database when authorized through a specific process requiring approval from the Office of General Counsel (OGC), Office of Oversight and Compliance (OOC), and DIA senior leadership. Permission to query the U.S. device location data has been granted five times in the past two-and-a-half years for authorized purposes. The timeline suggests that took place largely after Carpenter. Yet none of this is framed as a constitutional violation by the intelligence agencies.
"Our report does not attempt 'an independent legal analysis' of the issues involved," the advisory group says, a convenient elision that would do Amanda Waller proud."
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RELATED
U.S. government intelligence agencies are buying data about us. The danger to our civil liberties is so extreme that even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said things have gone too far in a detailed report released in June.
The report explains that federal intelligence agencies, like the NSA and FBI, do more than just conduct their own surveillance: they also buy data from private surveillance companies. This is a powerful partnership: the government’s desire to surveil us aligns well with corporations’ incentives in the surveillance economy. When intelligence agencies buy our data, they do not even follow basic constitutional safeguards—like obtaining warrants—since they say the purchased data is “publicly available.” In other words, since many data brokers will sell our personal data to anyone, intelligence agencies see no reason to treat that data as protected by the Fourth Amendment.
But the report warns that when the government buys data about us, it threatens our privacy and civil liberties, something EFF has been saying for years.
Intern Nicholas Wilson was the primary author of this post.
The report explains that federal intelligence agencies, like the NSA and FBI, do more than just conduct their own surveillance: they also buy data from private surveillance companies. This is a powerful partnership: the government’s desire to surveil us aligns well with corporations’ incentives in the surveillance economy. When intelligence agencies buy our data, they do not even follow basic constitutional safeguards—like obtaining warrants—since they say the purchased data is “publicly available.” In other words, since many data brokers will sell our personal data to anyone, intelligence agencies see no reason to treat that data as protected by the Fourth Amendment.
But the report warns that when the government buys data about us, it threatens our privacy and civil liberties, something EFF has been saying for years.. . ."
Article 2 Karl Bode writing in Techdirt
Massachusetts Prepares To Ban The Collection And Abuse Of Cell Phone Location Data
from the 'anonymize'-this dept
This data is hoovered up, “anonymized” to provide the pretense of user privacy, then sold to a wide assortment of largely unaccountable and frequently sleazy data brokers. This data is then widely and routinely abused from everybody from stalkers and foreign governments, to a long line of US government agencies looking to avoid having to get pesky warrants.
Despite this going on for the better part of two decades now, the U.S. has been too corrupt to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era reining in this abuse. Most regulatory actions at agencies like the FCC are theatrical at best. And while the FTC has been taking specific action against some companies, we’re not doing much in terms of an over-arching solution for the broader problem.
Enter Massachusetts, which is preparing to be the first state in the nation to ban the collection and monetization of user cell phone location data:
The legislature held a hearing last month on a bill called the Location Shield Act, a sweeping proposal that would sharply curtail the practice of collecting and selling location data drawn from mobile phones in Massachusetts. The proposal would also institute a warrant requirement for law-enforcement access to location data, banning data brokers from providing location information about state residents without court authorization in most circumstances.
You can peruse the House and Senate versions of the bill. MA’s legislature seems particularly motivated by the overturning of Roe, and the very legitimate concern that user location data will now be abused by both State AGs looking to prosecute women seeking reproductive health care, or radicals and vigilantes looking to purchase data on abortion clinic visitors (which has proven easy to do) in order to harass them:
- Politicians and law-enforcement officials would not be able to track user data once someone crosses over the Massachusetts state line without a warrant or unless in response to a reported imminent threat to human life.
- Should the bill pass, an app provider that did not comply would be subject to both legal action from the Massachusetts Attorney General and at risk of a civil suit from the individual.
Again, the federal government could have passed a basic privacy law regulating location data collection and sales a decade ago, but chose not to because abusing that data was too profitable (and provided an easy end-around to getting a warrant). Now, that hubris and greed is swinging back around to bite us on the ass as the country’s authoritarian movement aims to exploit the dysfunction created.
While the bill is expected to pass, I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s dramatically weakened or modified before that happens. There are an awful lot of folks in law enforcement — and a very long line of industries and companies — who definitely don’t want Massachusetts disrupting a very broken, and very profitable, status quo several decades in the making.
Filed Under: anonymization, cell phones, location data, massachusetts, privacy, security, warrants, wireless
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