Do you think the government needs a warrant to collect intimate data about you? Or that you’d have to at least be suspected of doing something wrong first?
Not exactly.
A newly released report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) details how the intelligence community buys significant amounts of data about you from data brokers who track almost everything people do on their phones and computers. This is data the government wouldn’t otherwise be able to obtain on a mass scale or without a court order. But because it’s available to purchase, there’s a legal gray area that the government happily takes advantage of. It’s using your money to do it, too.
The report is also an illustration of how a lack of laws prohibiting the government from buying this data or preventing companies from acquiring and selling it in the first place has created an extensive surveillance state.
“Americans should be furious their tax dollars are being used to buy their own personal information, even if they’re not suspected of any crime,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told Vox.
This is kind of Wyden’s thing. The Senate’s biggest privacy hawk has been trying to pass a bill that would forbid the government from buying data on its citizens for years. He also pushed for this report’s creation and release.
The ODNI report comes from a senior advisory panel established by director of national intelligence Avril Haines. Wyden asked Haines at her January 2021 confirmation hearing if she would agree to be transparent about the intelligence community’s secretive purchase of Americans’ data, to which she answered that yes, she would “try to publicize, essentially, a framework that helps people understand the circumstances under which we do that and the legal basis that we do that under.”
This report, which dates back to January 2022, is an effort to do just that. But it was only recently declassified, and then it was released to the general…
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