The Pentagon tried to hide that it bought Americans' data without a warrant | Hacker News Reader

The Pentagon tried to hide that it bought Americans' data without a warrant

wired.com

133 pointsRafelMri58 comments

Not that the NSA should be allowed to make an end run around the 4th amendment like this, but they're not really the problem here. Ban the aggregation and sale of personal data because commercial entities shouldn't be spying on us any more than government ones.

It’s like saying we should ban cigarette paper to stop smoking. Stop shady data collection and create modern day privacy laws.

What ticks me off is the fact this information was gathered at all. The fact that the Pentagon bought it is a predictable outcome.

> the fact this information was gathered at all

LLMs make practically any human-generated data valuable. These will be collected as long as it’s legal, to a greater degree now than before.

Time to start using an LLM to farm out massive amounts of faked computer-generated "human-generated" data about myself, then.

I've actually thought about something similar more than once. I think it would be interesting to have multiple accounts across multiple websites, all making posts and interacting with content across the algorithmic spectrums. That way, when mass-data harvesting via LLMs begins to become much more common, the data about what I think or believe is so tainted that it would be impossible to decipher a singular sincere ideology.

Everyone should assume that data running across any common communications method (GSM, HTTP, 900MHz etc...) is already stored by the collective global intelligence community.

Should you become a target of state, or state affiliated interests (usually through connection to someone else), then that information is quickly accessed and now you're now part of a "collection"

These data collection sinks are a foundational part of how international communications infrastructure is built, and cannot be taken out without building an entirely new set of communications infrastructure.

I like the fact there's actually commercial transactions here, seems like at least an additional layer of friction to access the data of US citizens. Imagine if the data owners was a government department, there would be seamless, always on availability for the Securitate

> I like the fact there's actually commercial transactions here, seems like at least an additional layer of friction to access the data of US citizens.

It's free for them as long as the taxpayer covers the cost.

> Imagine if the data owners was a government department, there would be seamless, always on availability for the Securitate

They would likely buy often, store everything they buy, and make it available to themselves.

you're right. It is little different from fascism. However, I still think there is friction whenever commercial contracts are concerns - looking at legal agreements, transfer of money etc. At least we can say this is the 'least efficient method of surveillance of the people' - that's a plus in my view

Government agencies require a data sharing agreement when providing data to other agencies. These are service level contracts that specify the data to be shared, the redistribution conditions, security requirements, update frequency, and other procedures. AFAIK these contracts are publicly disclosable if you want to do some FOIA requests.

I wonder how they could implement that? Perhaps some sort of currency based system, tied to your medical records, voting profile, commercial bonus programs, dating apps, travel profile, work rights, and carbon score?

We could call it "Currency Based Digital Chronicle", or CBDC for short.

We could instantly tax and fine all transactions, even retroactively, and use it to track and influence individuals based on the whims of the ruling class. We could disable it if someone disagrees with the narrative, or for testing purposes, for the laughs, or because it is Wednesday. Then undesireables could not work, eat, travel, date, or exist in society… It could be glorious! /s

If the information is on the market, then anyone can buy it, including the spooks. It would be super weird to say that everyone except spooks can buy it.

What would make sense is making sure it doesn't get on the market at all.

The Pentagon doesn’t arrest people. Does wired understand this? Espionage is unrelated to law enforcement. Spies don’t need a warrant. They’re not trying to put people in jail.

the US spy agencies do not have the right to spy on US citizens without a warrant. That's why they rely on allies' spies for that! Scratch my back, i scratch yours etc.

> US spy agencies do not have the right to spy on US citizens without a warrant

CIA needs a warrant. Undefined for the others. The NSA can’t arrest you.

As I understand it, the CIA operates on foreign threats. The FBI would be responsible for US citizens suspected of espionage. They do need a warrant, but they're part of the Justice department, not defense.

At least back in the 80s, the NSA's charter was that it did not deliberately spy on US citizens.

Did that explicitly change? If so, when and how? Or did this just become progressively normalized?

> the NSA's charter was that it did not deliberately spy on US citizens

Deliberately, yes. “Do not have the right to,” no.

Just to be pedantic, the DoD does have a large police force and a prison system.

There are multiple kinds of warrants.

To be fair, if the Pentagon had a warrant, then there wouldn't have been a need to purchase the data.

Anyway, I imagine this situation is much worse than we realize. I'll be the first to admit I have no evidence of this, but I am a general believer of, "Where there is smoke there is fire."

[dupe]

Discussion from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39136770

From the comments on a similar thread here yesterday it’s clear many people on HN are passionate about the subject even though they aren’t clear about what the fourth amendment protects, what the NSA does, what are rights, and so on.

No doubt about it.

I think that's great. I think societies are better served by a lot of passionate defenders of rights who don't quite get it right than by well-educated, apathetic lawyers who watch their actual rights get trampled.

> societies are better served by a lot of passionate defenders of rights

We don’t have this when it comes to privacy. Keyboard warriors, yes. Folks willing to make a call or write a letter, no. (Not in New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona or California, at least.)

I'm not convinced this will make much difference? When I have contacted my MP in the UK I get back very poor responses that are either generic or completely disputing everything I suggested. For example, if you have an evangelical member of congress there's little point in writing to them about a woman's right to choose.

Can you name a time when letter writing or calling successfully changed the law? If we are honest only violent protest has ever really changed anything.

> Can you name a time when letter writing was successful?

Yes, I’ve gotten text passes into federal law in America. People who call and write are willing to be organised by a primary opponent. Electeds take them seriously. (No clue for Britain.)

Text passed? Okay I think people are further removed from democracy than in the states, as I understand it lots of options are voted on by people locally in the US. We have zero direct democracy in the UK, only representation. There is zero way for me to get text put into a UK law as far as I am aware!

> as I understand it lots of options are voted on by people locally in the US

Yes, absolutely. But I’m talking about federal law. Two foreign policy pieces and a number of domestic laws. In this respect, our Congressmen are as local as your MPs.

I really do not think the MPs write the actual laws (a civil servant does that with some quite vague direction from elected officials) let alone allow the people contribute to them.

Resist.bot and 5 Calls make it easy. I find half the friction is finding the contact information.

> Resist.bot and 5 Calls make it easy

Duplicate comms work if they’re a significant fraction of likely primary voters. If ten people send a form letter in, it gets shredded. It’s not enough to signal organisation potential, yet enough to signal the people won’t take the next step of organising themselves.

Practically always, going to the elected’s website and submitting a short blurb is better than using a form. (Getting contact information usually involves just searching for the elected.)

Check them out—they aren't form factories.

Resist.bot is just an SMS-based interface to send emails or paper letters to politicians, designed to minimize friction. (At least the way I use it.) When I get pissed about some issue, having a single, quick interface where I can text any relevant politician my position is the difference between sending it and not.

That's an interesting viewpoint. Can you name other public policy issues, where it's preferable that decisions are made by the emotional and ignorant?

> it’s clear many people on HN are passionate about the subject even though they aren’t clear about what the fourth amendment protects, what the NSA does, what are rights, and so on

Having worked on privacy issues before, I’ll also venture they’re too cool to vote and/or think contacting one’s electeds is some kind of scam despite having rarely or never having done so. This is an issue that most Americans don’t care about. Those that do are civically uninvolved.

Can you flesh out how what is effectively out in the open is protected by 4A? We have en mass traded privacy for convenience and saving a few bucks. We've literally sold our privacy souls.

If you put your gun collection on your front yard, would a warrant be necessary? Well, our dirty laundry is hanging in the front yard, along with the rest of our personal data yard sale.

That said, I know there's a book dedicated to 1A, if there's similar for 4A I be interested.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_for_the_Thought_That...

p.s. I should clarify, I'm pro-privacy. But if we're going to give ourselves away as we do, it's not clear to me how 4A protects that.

Carpenter v. United States (2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

"in Carpenter the court determined that the third-party doctrine could not be extended to historical cell site location information (CSLI)"

Cell towers aren't a free market. Go ahead, try setting one up without involving the government. Cell towers are a massively-regulated sector that has collapsed into a trigopoly. The supreme court recognized this in 2018. Highly-regulated, highly-concentrated telecommunications carriers are, for purposes of the fourth amendment, treated as being part of the government.

Hopefully the same reasoning will be applied to banking (another highly-regulated, highly-concentrated, surveillance industry), but the court hasn't done that yet.

Whoa whoa, the Carpenter ruling has nothing to do with govt involvement in cell towers nor with the trigopoly. It has to do with two things: cell towers collect so much highly-personal info, and, more importantly, you have to have a cellphone to live in modern America.

> Whoa whoa,

You sound like Michael Hayden when you say that.

It's about centralization and regulation.

It literally is not. Read the opinion.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=146559747458077...

Centralization or regulation or government involvement in cell towers etc etc is not mentioned even once, not even obliquely. It is totally and completely irrelevant.

And yet the same three-letter intelligence agency hoovered up tons of phone meta data and...nothing happened legally to stop that. In fact, the whistle blower had to flee the country under a POTUS who expanded the reach of The Patriot Act.

Also, that telecommunications data was a direct dump to the NSA. This other data is for sale on the open market. Anyone with the money can buy it. Hard to imagine 4A protects that which was legally acquired and being resold.

If there's legal precedent to prevent this stuff it must be on holiday.

> nothing happened

This is untrue. Legally and politically.

Snowden is still considered a criminal.

Again, politically, it was the same POTUS who extended and expanded the Patriot Act, and got zero - or close - push back for both efforts.

Legally? Does it matter? When was the last time the law stopped the NSA from pushing - and breaking - the envelope?

Aside from Snowden, who suffered? Hint: No one. Nuff said.

> Legally? Does it matter?

Yes. Funding was shifted and practices changed.

> Aside from Snowden, who suffered? Hint: No one. Nuff said

Retribution isn’t the sole measure of progress.

Things I noticed yesterday that really confused people:

* The fourth amendment does not provide a right to privacy. In US federal law there is no right to privacy except for the limited provisions defined in the Privacy Act of 1974.

* The NSA is not law enforcement just as the Census Bureau is not law enforcement. Even when this was pointed out people still attempted to prove some point by comparing the NSA to police departments.

* Rights exist to protect people from government intrusion. People really want to either confuse rights with liberties or sweeping mandates applied irrespective of personal intrusions.

Your example is confusing. What does a warrant have to do with a person displaying weapons on their own lawn?

I believe the point was that, if a person displays their weapons on the lawn, the police don't need a warrant in order to discover that the person has those weapons. They can look from the street without having a warrant.

> In US federal law there is no right to privacy except for the limited provisions defined in the Privacy Act of 1974.

And yet Roe v Wade was decided on the basis of a right to privacy. Is abortion the only privacy right we have? Or was the Roe decision a case of judges judging on what they wanted, not on what the law said? Or do we actually have more of a right to privacy than what you are saying?

Things in the open don't need a warrant. To get to this personal data doesn't require intrusion. We've used it as currency and that currency is being resold on the open market.

I'm asking how 4A protects what is out in the open.

Does the Census Bureau collect information beyond what I voluntarily report?

It isn't voluntary.

13 U.S.C. § 221

The Census response rate is about 60%. It's interesting that this law is on the books but it is not enforced.

The census also has a constitutional mandate, where the NSA does not.

Right, so just to help clear that up: the fourth amendment is written on paper, it doesnt protect anything, the bill of rights only acknowledges that you have rights that supersede government authority.

No warrants have been issued, no searches performed & to my knowledge no seizures have been performed.

What does this have to do with the 4th amendment?

I would say a mechanism that effectively bypasses the 4th amendment has quite a lot to do with the 4th amendment. The intention behind the rule was not that it was OK to ignore it as long as money changed hands.

While your sentiment is valid it does not apply in this context. There is no activity the NSA performs that would require a warrant. In order for the fourth amendment to be necessary the collecting party must be the government, the possessing party must be inconvenienced or distressed, and the action must result in either involuntary seizure or violate a legally recognized expectation of privacy into public. The NSA only accounts for 1 of the three necessary ingredients.

What this reminds me of is the free speech vs. 1st Amendment doesn't apply to private companies discourse in the sense that the spirit but critically not the letter of the amendment is broken

but no one's hiding on the "we're making money by selling our consumers data side"

it's all cool when the capitalist collects information to manipulate the public, but God forbid the government do the same.

Its not clear to me that big data would be as prevelant as it is today in absense of a buyer of last resort (the government).

The capitalists have a known motive - profit. Governments don't have this open motive, which makes it more insidious. And as the monopoly on force projection, the gov't has a lot more power than any capitalist.

So google tracking me is "fine" (not that i would want it), but i sure as hell will not want the police to be tracking me without just cause.

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