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The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens (www.wired.com)

submitted 1 year ago by backyardfarmer@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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"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."

I thought that this was timely and relevant. Does federalization/decentralization solve these issues as we go into Web3? I'm newer to these ideas.

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[–] bouncing@partizle.com 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device's location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge's sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.”

Basically, they're buying the profiles corporations already have on you. It isn't just to sell you pasta sauce; your shoppers' card also helps build a government profile on you.

[–] polygon@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, exactly this. While I'm somewhat uneasy that a huge corporation has a bunch of data on me the most they can do with it is spam me. When the government has the same data their power is orders of magnitude greater and who knows how what you may have said 10 years ago can be used against you now.

There is a reason they're not allowed to have this data without a warrant. Just because this data is for sale doesn't mean they suddenly have the right to it. The power of the government is too great to trust with this, and we all know it, which is why those protections exist in the first place.

[–] bouncing@partizle.com 20 points 1 year ago

IMO, this is also a reminder, however, that the US needs better privacy laws in general. It won't always be just to spam you.

Think about your buying habits and consider whether they might be useful to, say, an insurance broker.

[–] ASCIIansi@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago

There have been a few stories about some companies getting punished for not going along with this plan of selling this private information. Like I think Qwest for example. This was over a decade ago, so I don't remember all the details that clearly.