FTA: "A rare but solid piece of reporting from the New York Times connects and outlines an issue that CTH 2.0 has been reviewing for several years with increased attention.
Essentially the U.S. security apparatus uses private sector data on cell phone users; purchasing as if they were commercial consumers of data; as part of their investigative and monitoring processes for Americans. This is a big privacy issue that has been the subject of several hours of backroom discussion amid the CTH 2.0 tech team.
A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times.
Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within a commercial database in five investigations over the past two and a half years, agency officials disclosed in a memo they wrote for Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.
[…] The disclosure sheds light on an emerging loophole in privacy law during the digital age: In a landmark 2018 ruling known as the Carpenter decision, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution requires the government to obtain a warrant to compel phone companies to turn over location data about their customers. But the government can instead buy similar data from a broker — and does not believe it needs a warrant to do so.
[…] The government’s use of commercial databases of location information has come under increasing scrutiny. Many smartphone apps log their users’ locations, and the app makers can aggregate the data and sell it to brokers, who can then resell it — including to the government.
It has been known that the government sometimes uses such data for law enforcement purposes on domestic soil."
FTA: "A rare but solid piece of reporting from the New York Times connects and outlines an issue that CTH 2.0 has been reviewing for several years with increased attention.
Essentially the U.S. security apparatus uses private sector data on cell phone users; purchasing as if they were commercial consumers of data; as part of their investigative and monitoring processes for Americans. This is a big privacy issue that has been the subject of several hours of backroom discussion amid the CTH 2.0 tech team.
A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times.
Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within a commercial database in five investigations over the past two and a half years, agency officials disclosed in a memo they wrote for Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.
[…] The disclosure sheds light on an emerging loophole in privacy law during the digital age: In a landmark 2018 ruling known as the Carpenter decision, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution requires the government to obtain a warrant to compel phone companies to turn over location data about their customers. But the government can instead buy similar data from a broker — and does not believe it needs a warrant to do so.
[…] The government’s use of commercial databases of location information has come under increasing scrutiny. Many smartphone apps log their users’ locations, and the app makers can aggregate the data and sell it to brokers, who can then resell it — including to the government.
It has been known that the government sometimes uses such data for law enforcement purposes on domestic soil."
(post is archived)