It is an unconstitutional practice. If they didn’t think it was they wouldn’t go through the extra steps to get the data. Outsourcing one part of the illegal enterprise doesn’t make the whole thing legal.
But if they want to play this game, an interesting way to bait a Supreme Court case might be to request a CCPA delete for the NSAs “commercial” data.
Good luck with that. You cannot delete something which "doesn't exists". /s
The second piece about comparing the government to a business isn't valid. There exist many laws and rules that apply only to the government.
Not that I agree with the distinction. I think companies larger than the US government at formation should probably have rules to keep them good for humanity.
Realistically, scraping people for their data like this should just not be allowed at all. People are more important than corporations.
Can state law compel a federal agency to do anything?
Within the jurisdiction of a state, probably. States rights should have precedent over federal except in cases that involve interstate activity. This is being tested in Texas right now with various firearm laws that are meant for items made in and staying within Texas.
Positions like this really aren't helpful because they detract from existing discussions on ways to mitigate data loss. The information a DMV sells isn't behavioral data.
We should just accept the status quo. We should not fight for privacy aby more. We should accept global surveillance without a fight.
No. We van do something. We van limit our data. It may be futile, but I cannot leave things be like that.
What do you mean? Care to elaborate on the network (I think I know what you mean about authenticated, but I need to be sure where for).
Obviously, the intelligence agencies are thwarting the spirit of the law requiring warrants by buying data hoovered up by big data.
But I was always told growing up not to share things on the internet I don't want everyone to know. I feel like you kind of deserve having your data hoovered up by the government if you share that data publicly on social media, but personal responsibility doesn't appear to be a contributing factor in this discussion for some reason.
That's not the only source of data, obviously, but there are a lot of people on HN who think blocking ads is piracy. To those people, I present this exact problem, because they should have seen it coming. Adtech is amoral and unethical, and ways of life that rely upon it should collapse. No mercy, I don't care, find a better business model or live on the street.
Let's be glad then, that policy is not based on your feelings. You had the privilege of education, that doesn't mean those still ignorant deserve the abuse.
ALL data collection should be restored to its natural state of OptIn, no matter what zuck or any other silicon valley bro says.
It's unreasonable to expect every citizen to understand when and where their data is being taken.
It's unreasonable to expect people to understand what actions lead to what data points.
It's unreasonable to assess data for unrelated traits that don't match every person perfectly.
It's unreasonable to trust a company selling data to not at some point include illegal data. Certainly not without a verified chain of custody.
It is unreasonable for the government to bypass the constitution by using limited interpretation of language.
If the data is already commercially available, why not access it.
If you want to fight this, regulate the commercial collection and sale of this data.
It’s not just which data or where they get it (though surely many types and sources of data should be restricted too, especially without a warrant) but the fact that they are building a profile, targeting, etc. at all. These are things the government/law enforcement should not be doing lightly or without supervision.
We have an agency beholden to no-one with the power to blackmail any journalist, lawyer, politician, associate, etc.
We have an agency that seems to take pride in "hacking" the constitution. We've been shown glimpses and glimmers of clever mechanisms to run-around the US Constitution.
Go ahead and use a VPN and lock down your stupid android OS. You fail to grasp the breadth and depth of sources for harvesting "public" intel.
If you want to be a founder and have no moral code there's ample opportunity here. IoT and connectivity make it cheaper than ever to generate intel on people. Fingerprint people's voices in public, travel patterns, associations, bluetooth/wifi device ids, home wifi attributes, etc. Who's the customer? Big Brother.. Spy on your fellow Americans to help combat Terrorism.
Tin foil hat on: It might be too late for any of this to be meaningfully reformed. The people-in-charge already have enough blackmail on politicians they can drown out dissent. If there is any reform, the info gained from illegitimate sources is already stored as weights into a neural model for future use. Creating the neural model would be "constitutional" because the models aren't "searched" lol
Our national security apparatus is running on self-signed certs. Hope nothing goes wrong with that!
This is reality.
I'm far from the first person to recommend this.
I sure hope you have a big war chest for litigation.
GDPR is a disaster but the intent was good. Here in America we just say go for it.
They're beholden to congress. No US entity is beholden to no-one
If an entity can forever dismiss Congressional inquiry through unlimited open-ended legalistic escapes that are virtually always applicable, then it is de facto above Congress. This also exists, and is different than the first example.
Congress is a feckless body of government when it comes to checks and balances.
I’m comfortable saying that US intel agencies are rouge and beholden to no one and no laws.
I guess it would be nice if congress held the executive in check.. but maybe they can't bc of sinister reasons >:D
Wasn't there a report recently of the FBI illegally searching US Senators?? Something really wacky is going on.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In a digital world, one's "Person" and "effects" have become inseparable from the phones/platforms we communicate with. Participation in many cases is not a choice if one is to function in society.
The requirement that warrants are issued only upon establishment of probable cause also highlights the issue here. It seems highly dubious that a company holding your data and selling that data is somehow an acceptable end-around the warrant requirement.
Is this all technically legal? Seems like it might be. Is this what the authors of the 4th amendment had in mind? Seems extremely unlikely.
you are not inconvenienced when the NSA buys data in the same way that you're inconvenienced when you have to feed/house a soldier.
While it's extremely unlike the authors of the 4th amendment had the internet & etc in mind this concept of selling things to the government surely was known to them and so the current implementation would be OK from their perspective.
A lot of the first 10 amendments are about protecting your physical property from the Government. 2nd - Guns, 3rd - House, 4th - Property, 8th - Money. The digital bits that Google and etc created (ex. metadata) are clearly neither in your procession nor your property. There is no amendment that protects letters you wrote but gave to somebody else nor recordings made by somebody else of your interaction with them.
I can't read the 4th amendment and this article and not come to a conflict. It seems obvious to me that it is unreasonable to expect a person (with the average IQ being 94-98) to understand what data on their phone is public or private.
It's obvious because we have millions of teenagers believing they have privacy on their phones to a point where they break incredibly consequential laws to store sexualized imagery there.
What the average citizen believes is private is where the goal posts should be.
So a potential solution is to poll America asking the following question:
Donald Trump and Joe Biden would both like to download all the data on your phone to share with the world via press conference. Do you accept? If 50% of people so no, it is unreasonable.
Disclaimer: I worked on Geolocation products with the top 3 aggregators and have extensive experience with Palantir.
1. Landlord writes into rental agreements that they could have someone inspect the property every year.
2. Sold access to people's apartments to police officers every year.
Congress didn't testify to Congress, Clapper did. Clapper did so in both public and private settings.
Clapper didn't tell the truth in a public setting because it was classified. Clapper (privately & immediately) informed Congress of the need for a private meeting to correct things he said in the public setting.
This would be akin to your husband asking you were the cookies are and since you noticed your son around the corner saying you don't know. Then when you son leaves you tell him they're in the top of the cabinet. Nobody is going to actually be mad except your son (that's you in this example!).
Although you may have miss the tamer recent version where Ebay sent "a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, and a book entitled “Grief Diaries: Surviving Loss of a Spouse", practiced installing a GPS tracker and then travelled 3000 miles to install one, "The Defendants also posted the Steiner’s address on Craigslist and other websites, inviting strangers to the Steiners’ home for sex parties, and advertising yard sales".
The story has a happy ending though as "Defendant Wenig departed eBay with a $57 million severance package.".
> https://www.techdirt.com/2021/07/29/exec-that-tried-to-send-...
> https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.236...
At least one person went to prison, so there's that.
This is in contrast to militaries who are assumed to operate as legitimate extensions of foreign policy.
Your friend also cannot just bust into your house and search through your things. Now the government because it has enormous powers behind it and people willing to do the wrong thing on its behalf is specifically limited in what it’s allowed to do.
Google may.
No other variants of Android do, AFAIK.
People have digital homes just as they have physical homes, and they have digital letters (mail, messages or chat) traveling to and from those digital homes. It is not unreasonable to expect all of that to be private against broad government surveillance.
You're decided to add a condition of "held by the post office" to the letter example. This is not at all what I wrote. Once the letter is delivered (as it was in my example) that recipient may give it to the Government without a warrant. The government may just not forcibly take it without a warrant.
Again, NSA isn't going into your digital home. They're going into Verizon's digital home and Verizon has invited them in there. Sure Verizon has information there that you gave them but just like if it had written Verizon physical letters it's not _your_ home its _Verizon's_ home.
It's fine to think of this like a loophole but gathering information and selling it really isn't some novelty that didn't exist in the 1700s.
by extension 5th amendment is hogwash, shielding the obviously guilty.
Both geolocation and sexual proclivities are often considered private.
2 years ago I had access to enough data to stalk any person I chose, anywhere in North America. If they connected to a network of websites (GM/Stellantis/Nissan corp and all their dealer pages, plus most of MBUSA) I could see a profile of them and where they went.
I knew their work schedule, where they worked, where they did lunch, when they were in a meeting and when they were taking the day to go to Canada's Wobderland. This was done with permission of the friend and encouraged by my boss.
The end result was dealerships having a ~90% accurate intent to purchase. Which was used to increase sale prices. We were measuring the success with our partners at a Lexus dealer in Toronto.
* Some brands(of vehicles) have been changed to similar brands to protect myself.
Your example is knowing the location of somebody. That's it. You example isn't about knowing who they're calling, what they're saying, their Wordle high score, their pictures, theirs emails, etc.
I don't doubt you had highly detailed geolocation. Just make that your poll though since that's what you have an example of.
Please, don't treat me like I'm an imbecile. That's congress' job
Edit: also, that's such a shit parenting job. take the opportunity, and tell your significant other that it's not time for cookies and it'll spoil your dinner. there's no reason to lie about it. you have a teachable moment, and you've chosen to teach that it is okay to lie rather than something more valuable.
Going on TV and Clapper saying _he just made a mistake_ is really what I think you have issue with. But none of this TV statements are under oath.
If the answer to a question is classified then it is classified regardless of whether it is yes or no.
But the answer to that question being classified is objectionable, because a large proportion of the public would have taken issue with not knowing, because they would have objected to the program.
It would be like lying in a deposition in front of the board of directors and then going back in private to your friend the line manager and saying "hey, that thing I said when it really matters was a lie because I didn't want the board to find out about it."
Because that's what's really happening here. Once you sell your data to Facebook, Twitter, etc, it's no longer "in your house." If you granted third parties license to collect and sell your data under terms of service, then that data no longer belongs to you, and you agreed to that..
To me the bigger problem isn't the government buying data on the open market, it's that data is a market to begin with.
That's the general thrust of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and is called the "third-party doctrine". But the Carpenter decision in 2018 is a big exception to that, and it's likely that more are to come.
Seems like a problem that will never be fixed, on purpose.
One concerning development is how much the Democratic Party, which used to be a major proponent of restrictions on government searches, has cozied up to the defense and intelligence establishments since 2016 because of a shared interest in stopping populist right-wing movements that also happen to be anti-interventionist. They're also less keen on digital rights these days because they want to censor right-wingers online.