As NSA buys up Americans' browser records, Uncle Sam is asked to simply knock it off

US Senator Ron Wyden on Thursday asked US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to stop US intelligence agencies from purchasing Americans' unlawfully collected personal data from data brokers. In a letter [PDF] to Haines, Wyden (D-OR) said that not only are US intelligence agencies buying location data harvested from …

[IgorS]

Barking at the wrong tree

> This personal information flows from web and native apps on people's devices to app makers and their marketing partners, and then to data brokers who sell it on to others, and it can be had by Uncle Sam's agents without a warrant.

If the data is available to anyone offering money, then the users have already lost.

The fact that (US) national agencies pay for it, too, is only mildly annoying at this point.

FTC should make sure such data cannot be put for sale in the first place!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Barking at the wrong tree

Hear hear. Put a stop to it by making data brokering illegal!

[sev.monster]

Re: Barking at the wrong tree

What do data brokers and lobbyists have in common? They should both be shot into space.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Barking at the wrong tree

Space (LEO) is polluted enough already. You need use a sufficiently big rocket to push them further out

[EricB123]

Re: Barking at the wrong tree

Maybe you are looking at the problem backwards. Remember that big underground nuclear waste vault that was cancelled years ago? Hell, the half-life of data can't be more than a thousand years, a mere blip in nuclear waste half life. And the data brokers themselves? A mere blink of an eye.

[NeilPost]

Re: Barking at the wrong tree

Yet the GOP and NSA nutters continue with asinine debate about what the Second Amendment means whilst this unlawful rapeand pillage of data continues largely unabated and above the law:

[newspuppy]

But FB and Google and others can targer?

Publicly available information,... that others pay for, or have a larger collection of data..

and... they use it to target adverts at you.....

or 'customise' information so you shall be receptive...

and.. the intelligence services are not allowed to buy this?

Insane..

[Doctor Syntax]

The problem isn't that it can be bought with or without a record. The problem isn't even that it's for sale. The problem is that it exists.

[Jellied Eel]

The problem isn't that it can be bought with or without a record. The problem isn't even that it's for sale. The problem is that it exists.

Yup. Most data protection legislation starts with the requirement that data controllers hold the minimum personal information necessary to perform a function. Data rapists just decide that means 'everything'. Every message sent, every picture taken, every keystroke made, every conversation. My phone remiinded me of this yesterday when it told me I still hadn't 'backed up' my pictures to AlphaGoo. I have backed up my pics, or at least the ones I want to keep, just there are some I really don't want to share.

But such is politics. It's all about this-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness

According to Senator Ron Wyden, TIA was the "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States"

Congress defunded the Information Awareness Office in late 2003 after media reports criticized the government for attempting to establish "Total Information Awareness" over all citizens.

But Wyden and Wiki use the wrong tense, and know it. TIA1.0 may have been 'defunded', but TIA2.0 lives on. And it isn't just a US problem given the EU is still pushing hard to enhance it's own version under the Digital Serveillance.. I mean Digital Services efforts.

[oldcomputerguy]

They have been doing this for a while

The US built a data center in the desert that supposedly captures ALL cell phone data, and EVERYTHING on the internet a while back. This is from 2012.

https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff-nsadatacenter/

You just need more hard drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They have been doing this for a while

just sounds like an expansion of ECHELON

[sev.monster]

Re: They have been doing this for a while

PRISM, ECHELON, TIA, all the same phoenix under different names and nothing new.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

NSA

They should just rename themselves.

National Security[Snooping] Agency

[Anonymous Coward]

and the NSA/FBI/CIA all claim China is the problem....

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, there is no backdoor in the Chinese systems that they can use...

Currently, NSA buys data instead of just parsing the raw data they already have access to mainly because it is already aggregated and organized in a proper way to do fast searches.

[Anonymous Coward]

No mention here of.......

....Palantir.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel

Worry about Fort Meade......but worry even more about Peter Thiel!!!

[Groo The Wanderer]

If you want to stop the NSA, you have to stop the illegal data brokers, too. Just stopping the NSA doesn't cut it, buck-o.

[amanfromMars 1]

Cyber Command and Computer Control with Remote Virtual ACTivity ....

...... AI Just Doing ITs Universal Advanced Cyber Threat/Treat Thing

:-) To not know that all that you may do, and even quite probably what you may be thinking to do next, is no longer a secret known only to you and with that and those physically and practically engaged with, is both a great shame that you only have to blame yourself for and is, for that which and those who would know what to effectively do with such info/intel, an abiding easily exploited and able to be both an exciting and catastrophic vulnerability for all manner of extremely rewarding and damaging shenanigans against which there be no available defences.

And it is cold comfort indeed to realise such knowledgeable presences/entities are never to be found in existing politically incorrect and inept systems administrations, although as with every dark cloud having a silver lining, you can rejoice at the fact that the more the status quo battles against the emergence of novel disruptive technologies with laudable noble meritocratic tendencies/otherworldly inclinations, the greater the resistance to quite obvious status quo serial failures grows to strengthen the appearance and/or influence on a new breed of Greater IntelAIgent Game Players/New More Orderly World Order Grand Masters commenting on the dire straits global state of human conditioning preparing them for such existential matters and NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive IT.