“This report reveals what we feared most,” according to policy attorney at Demand Progress Sean Vitka.
QUICK FACTS:
- Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has discovered that the U.S. government accumulated data on Americans in a newly declassified report.
- Haines’ investigation began in 2021, when she instructed her advisers to look into a web of business arrangements between data brokers and U.S. intelligence members.
- “This report makes it clear that the government continues to think it can buy its way out of constitutional protections using taxpayers’ own money,” said Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) law fellow Chris Baumohl. “Congress must tackle the government’s data broker pipeline this year, before it considers any reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” he added, referring to a surveillance power used for noncitizens residing outside of the United States.
- “This report reveals what we feared most,” said policy attorney at Demand Progress Sean Vitka. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”
- One of the main ideas of the report is how the government views “publically available information,” suggesting that if Americans’ data is able to be purchased, it may be considered “publically available.”
FROM THE REPORT:
- The report’s first summarized section reads, “The single most important point in our report is this: CAI [commercially available information] is increasingly powerful for intelligence and increasingly sensitive for individual privacy and civil liberties, and the IC [intelligence community] therefore needs to develop more refined policies to govern its acquisition and treatment. Our report does not prescribe those policies (in keeping with our timeline and role as outside advisors) but we hope that it will assist the IC with their development.”
- According to the document, the government supposedly believes it can legally acquire data without infringing upon Fourth Amendment rights because the information is publically available via purchase.
- For example, the report includes a “publically available information” definition used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), part of which states the data “is available to the public by subscription or purchase.”
- Some of the data includes ad-tracking and location information, as well as “political, religious, travel, and speech activities.”
- The report says that the government “would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits.”
- “Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation. While the IC cannot willingly blind itself to this information, it must appreciate how unfettered access to CAI increases its power in ways that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other societal expectations,” the section continues.
- If the information falls into the wrong hands or is misused, the information may be used for “blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.”
- The report provides three recommendations: developing a cataloging process for CAI, creating CAI standards for the evaluation of data acquisition, and establishing “privacy-protecting guidance.”
BACKGROUND:
- American Faith reported that the House Judiciary Committee launched an expanded probe into banks sharing clients’ information with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
- According to FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill and Special Agent-in-Charge of the Boston Field Office, Joseph Bonavolonta, Bank of America “with no directive from the FBI, data-mined its customer base” and produced a list of customers who had utilized their services during the specified date range, reads a letter from the Committee.
- In another letter, chairmen of the committee Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Thomass Massie (R-KY) expressed concern that the information “had no individualized nexus to particularized criminal conduct but was rather a data dump of customers’ transactions over a three-day period.”
