US National Security Agency buys web browsing data without warrant, letter shows
US National Security Agency buys web browsing data without warrant, letter shows
17 comments
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It's blurry. The Patriot Act, after the 9/11 terrosist attacks on the Twin Towers, established a lot of freedom for the US government to spy on its citizens. Lawmakers have been making necessary, holy-shit-we-are-courting-fascism corrections in scope ever since.
Depending on how the courts interpret the adjustments that have happened since the Patriot Act, it may or may not be illegal.
I suspect the legal challenge mostly relies on purchasing law. The US has lots of laws about how the government must act when buying something, in particular.
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This isn't spying, though. They purchased information that was perfectly legal to sell.
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It's literally not illegal at all. And in my opinion it's fucking stupid to hamstring the government when private companies do this all the time.
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OSINT teams buy databases on darkweb to do investigations too. Agencies can be punched in court for obtaining an information that shouldn't be availiable to them and paying criminals as it's not up to legal standards, like tapping the phone without an order. But real criminals are data miners and thieves. And in some cases, weirdly enough, it's still legal to do that.
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Private companies being shitheads is a terrible reason to allow the government to be shitheads.
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I'm sure government agencies buy commercially available products all the time. The problem is that we are no longer just consumers in the market, we are also unwillingly the product.
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And this is why governments are so reluctant to pass any strong data privacy laws and enforce them. They greatly benefit from this data market.
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17 comments
Y'all are seeing the real problem here, right? Your data is just available for anyone with the cash to pay for it. Stopping just the NSA from buying this data is attacking the issue from the wrong end.
There should be protocols and practices in place to stop our data from being owned and sold. Hence why I take the steps I do to help anonymize myself to a small degree. Ditch Facebook, ditch apple, ditch google, ditch Microsoft, ditch any provider that wants to claim your data that tou can to minimize this sort of behavior.
John Oliver was able to buy data of politicians to get them to click on porn of Ted Cruz or something a long those lines. Thats the route we have to go to get this changed. Like when leaking Bork's video rental history got privacy protections passed in the 80s
Serious question: Do you browse this app, or similar sites, on an iPhone or Android device? If so, how are you getting away from those companies?
My thought exactly. Since when does buying something require a warrant? The problem is obviously that it's allowed to be sold period.