Today I’m linking to the Wired Magazine article, I’m sure there’s plenty of sources. Wired is pretty interesting, it’s really an old magazine, and they are always pushing a $5 one year subscription. It’s worth it, in my opinion.
The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens
We’ve known at least since Ed Snowden, if we didn’t know before, that (forgive my personal opinion) the government is constantly lying to us. We now have a newly-released report from the Director of National Intelligence about how the us spy/law enforcement agencies are flouting the intent of relevant laws. They are using older laws to support actions that wouldn’t be supported by the intent of current law. This is really huge.
The release of this report goes back to a March 8 hearing where Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon asked a CIA chief about releasing the report. The report was declassified last Friday.
The worst abuse is the line of thinking that says a government can circumvent 4th Amendment protections by using their credit card instead of traditional surveillance techniques. Effectively, the government says the fact that the private information is out there for purchase legitimizes their possession of information about millions of Americans.
Shout out in the article to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Just for the old days I’ll also mention the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I’ll link their article at the end.
One problem pointed out by the report is the problem of de-anonymization. Companies collect data and then sell it in “anonymized form.” It’s well knows that simple attempts to anonymize data will fail. leaving the PII of an individual available for the governments use.
Perhaps the most famous case proving the risks of anonymizing data, there was a study that found based on only 4 transactions on a credit card, anonymized records were used to identify the card holder.
Credit card users easily identified from ‘anonymized’ data
They actually found the could de-anonymize people based on three transactions if they had the price of the transaction.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the report. The report notes:
“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.”
Have a great week, we’ll see you for the Crypto project next week! Here’s the EFF article about a recent court decision as a bonus:
Federal Judge Makes History in Holding That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant
Today’s featured image: “NSA data center (seen from Freedom Ridge) 15, Blￚle, Utah, USA” by gruntzooki is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.