25 votes

The US is openly stockpiling dirt on all its citizens

Posted by MangoTiger
Tags: privacy, security, usa, data, surveillance, politics, government, office of the director of national intelligence, reports, author.dell cameron, source.wired, paywall
https://www.wired.com/story/odni-commercially-available-information-report/

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Authors
Dell Cameron, Dhruv Mehrotra, Stephanie McNeal, Varsha Bansal, Medea Giordano, Andrew Couts, Matt Burgess, Andy Greenberg, Lily Hay Newman, Justin Ling
Published
Jun 12 2023
Word count
510 words

4 comments

  1. [2]
    MangoTiger
    Link
    Wall Street Journal article about the same topic: U.S. Spy Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Americans’ Personal Data, U.S. Says The actual report from the Office of the DNI (which neither article...

    A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.
    --
    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.

    What that report ended up saying constitutes a nightmare scenario for privacy defenders.

    Wall Street Journal article about the same topic: U.S. Spy Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Americans’ Personal Data, U.S. Says
    The actual report from the Office of the DNI (which neither article links for some reason)

    16 votes
    1. marron12
      Link Parent
      From the report: I guess I'm not shocked, but that sure doesn't mean I like it. The report seems to boil down to: we have access to all this private information. So let's catalog it and come up...

      From the report:

      For example, under Carpenter v. United States, acquisition of persistent location information (and perhaps other detailed information) concerning one
      person by law enforcement from communications providers is a Fourth Amendment “search” that generally requires probable cause. However, the same type of information on millions of Americans is openly for sale to the general public. As such, IC policies treat the information as PAI [publicly available information] and IC [intelligence community] elements can purchase it.

      I guess I'm not shocked, but that sure doesn't mean I like it. The report seems to boil down to: we have access to all this private information. So let's catalog it and come up for standards for using it. That would take into consideration how trustworthy is the source, how bad do we need the info, things like that. But we can't stop using it ("the IC cannot willingly blind itself to this information").

      7 votes
  2. [2]
    isopod
    Link
    I'm not even remotely surprised. The Snowden leaks were about 10 years ago; at that point, US intelligence was already ingesting most of the Internet's traffic. Given the intelligence community's...

    I'm not even remotely surprised. The Snowden leaks were about 10 years ago; at that point, US intelligence was already ingesting most of the Internet's traffic. Given the intelligence community's mandate, the fact that they were under higher scrutiny, and then considering the steady movement of defense responsibilities from the public to private sector, I wouldn't be surprised if the regulatory ecosystem which allows private companies to collect all this data has been tacitly supported by decision makers. It's the logical thing to do from their perspective.

    I don't really have a problem with the current situation as long as the government acts in its citizens' best interest... but that's the problem, isn't it? Hard to imagine not using the information when it exists, and if the most recent decade has shown us anything, it's that progress is not guaranteed.

    10 votes
    1. TemulentTeatotaler
      Link Parent
      Besides that, if the data exists it can be hacked. The OPM has been breached before and (afaik, as a non-expert) the WannaCry attacks could have been prevented if intelligence agencies prioritized...

      Hard to imagine not using the information when it exists

      Besides that, if the data exists it can be hacked. The OPM has been breached before and (afaik, as a non-expert) the WannaCry attacks could have been prevented if intelligence agencies prioritized security over stockpiling vulnerabilities.

      7 votes