ANALYSIS – It’s not just the communists in China who are scooping up every bit of personal data they can find on individual Americans, it’s our own federal government, law enforcement, and the intelligence community (IC) that is also doing it.
But in this case, it’s not through vast illegal surveillance as uncovered by WikiLeaks, or even through coercive requests from social media sites like the Twitter Files exposed.
Instead, we now learn the feds are getting around the Constitution by simply buying sensitive data from private sector data brokers.
A newly declassified intelligence report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) completed in January 2022, shows the vast extent of this outrageous government overreach into our personal lives.
The report details how federal agencies including intelligence and law enforcement entities are regularly circumventing our 4th Amendment right against unlawful search and seizure.
Sadly, as individuals, we are partly to blame, by voluntarily giving up so much of our data to private commercial firms, social media sites, apps, phone and internet service providers, etc.
The IC refers to this as commercially available information (CAI), basically any “information that is available commercially to the general public.” This “can include credit histories, insurance claims, criminal records, employment histories, incomes, ethnicities, purchase histories, and interests.”
While the data are often initially made anonymous by the providers (‘anonymized’), ODNI notes that it’s often easy for the feds “to deanonymize and identify individuals, including U.S. persons.”
The report is very clear of the dangers, warning: “Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained, if at all, only through targeted (and predicated) collection.”
Reason.com notes how this is “isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of behavior.” It explains:
Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained thousands of records showing that Department of Homeland Security agencies were purchasing “huge volumes of people’s cell phone location information” and “sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures.” And a 2016 inspector general report detailed the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of paying confidential sources at private companies and in other government agencies for people’s confidential information.
The ODNI report came at the request of Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines but took a while to be released. In March 2023, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) asked Haines if her office would release the report, to which she replied, “I think it absolutely should.” Yet it took a lawsuit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center before the report saw the light of day.
“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,” Wyden said after the report’s release.
The fact that such information is available to anybody with a credit card may be concerning, but the fact that a government agency can access it with a requisition form is significantly more troubling. As the ODNI report notes, “Unfettered access to CAI increases [the intelligence community’s] power in ways that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other societal expectations.” The information also poses a risk of “mission creep,” as information “collected for one purpose may be reused for other purposes.”
This dangerously intrusive information-gathering effort by our government agencies should concern all Americans. But so should the fact that so much of our sensitive private data is legally up for sale.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Via:
Internet
Smart devices
Our phones
Software
allow Govt to SPY
Go right ahead and spy on me. You won’t like what I have to say or what I think about Biden and his pervert administration. I have a few choice words for CIA, Fed, FBI and DOJ. Our military who has turned into cowards, perverts and children abusers. Tv shows and new outlets who are so uneducated and unamerican. Anytime you the corrupt justice system wants to talk about facts let me know.
Just think, those people that are heading, and working, for these different departments in our government are not selected by us, they are hired by people that were appointed to their jobs. We the voters have no say in any of this, except for those we elected to run the government, and they aren’t doing very well, are they?
SMART phones:
Surreptitious
Malicious
Agencies
Reading
Thoughts