Wyden, who released the Dec. 11 letter, called upon U.S. intelligence officials to stop using Americans’ personal data without their express knowledge and consent, saying it was unlawful
Anybody able to explain how this is unlawful?
Is there a restriction on intelligence gathering agencies that would apply?
I don’t believe this is right or fair but I’m not clear on how it’s illegal.
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.
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.
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.
buys … from commercial brokers
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.
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?
As MajorHavoc said, there are ways. I do in fact use GrapheneOS, have access to a reasonably secure VPN, I use Firefox as well as Vanadium, within Firefox I use Ublock Origin and a few other tools. Some argue that having as many layers of “protection” is counterintuitive because it makes your fingerprint on the web more unique.
GrapheneOS is a good start.
So is brwsing with Firefox and uBlock origin, and a VPN.
There’s a ‘deGoogle Yourself’ Lemmy that gives lots of guidance (and it works beyond just Google).
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.
