In an unclassified December 11 letter addressed to Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden obtained by the New York Times, NSA director Paul Nakasone confirms the agency buys...
At the risk of playing devils advocate, are they not allowed to subscribe to newspapers without a warrant? This is publicly purchasable information bought by a (checks notes) agency with the expressed mission if gathering as much data as possible.
If Rep Wyden wants to prevent this, the first - and most important - legislative action is to prevent its collection and sale, not some anti-TLA circle jerk about the NSA buying it on the open market.
This was my first thought. All of our data is already on a marketplace for companies to buy and sell. What is stopping any government agency, federal or smaller from simply participating in this?
We need to fix the root of the problem if this is to be stopped.
There’s a big difference between a publicly published newspaper and shdy companies opaquely data mining people’s internet browser activity either completely secretly, burying it in a eula/tos or using shdy language to manipulate people into giving up their data.
Okay - how about corporate data; deep dives into intimate corporate workings and connections by financial wonks.
This isn’t “shady companies mining data in secret” - these are registered, for profit corporations who’s stated goal is to collect, sort, and mine trillions of bytes of information and provide output of any cross section in any sort order to anyone with a big check book. Koch brothers. Disney. Russia. Anyone. The problem isn’t that the NSA is doing its job with budgeted funds, it’s that we allow this service to exist.
At the risk of playing devils advocate, are they not allowed to subscribe to newspapers without a warrant? This is publicly purchasable information bought by a (checks notes) agency with the expressed mission if gathering as much data as possible.
If Rep Wyden wants to prevent this, the first - and most important - legislative action is to prevent its collection and sale, not some anti-TLA circle jerk about the NSA buying it on the open market.
This was my first thought. All of our data is already on a marketplace for companies to buy and sell. What is stopping any government agency, federal or smaller from simply participating in this?
We need to fix the root of the problem if this is to be stopped.
There’s a big difference between a publicly published newspaper and shdy companies opaquely data mining people’s internet browser activity either completely secretly, burying it in a eula/tos or using shdy language to manipulate people into giving up their data.
Okay - how about corporate data; deep dives into intimate corporate workings and connections by financial wonks.
This isn’t “shady companies mining data in secret” - these are registered, for profit corporations who’s stated goal is to collect, sort, and mine trillions of bytes of information and provide output of any cross section in any sort order to anyone with a big check book. Koch brothers. Disney. Russia. Anyone. The problem isn’t that the NSA is doing its job with budgeted funds, it’s that we allow this service to exist.