The IRS is being investigated for using location data without a warrant

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj479d/irs-investigation-location-data-no-warrant-venntel

by elorant • 6 years ago

262 80 6 years ago

arcticbull• 6 years ago

I'll be honest with you, if they combined this information with everything else they already know about my income, and had me sign a completed tax return at the end of the year instead of playing a game of "hope you don't accidentally commit tax fraud" I'd be ok with it.

maerF0x0• 6 years ago

in darknet diaries EP 26 - IRS they talk about how the budget and staff got severely cut resulting in major IT issues. I think if we want a better system we're going to also be ok with giving a portion of the Turbo Tax to fund the development, maintenance, and securing of the systems required.

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/26/

colejohnson664• 6 years ago

I don’t think people would be as upset with Intuit building that system (for the IRS) as they are that they lobby for complicated tax codes.

pc867• 6 years ago

Yes, unless you have a lot of vendor income below the reporting threshold the IRS probably has a very good idea how much money you make. Here's an incomplete list of what they don't know that makes "but you should know my taxes!!" arguments moot:

* You got married, divorced, or became a widow[er]

* You had or lost a child

* You paid mortgage loan interest on a primary residence

* You paid student loan interest

Or any number of other things that could have changed your adjusted gross income, which is what you're actually taxed on.

The only way the IRS can bill you for actual taxes owed is if the tax code is simplified (an objectively good thing). The only way the tax code is simplified to that level is if most deductions and credits disappear, and whether or not that's "good" is arguable at best.

hyperman1• 6 years ago

It is possible. In Belgium, the tax authorities have all this information and more. The 'tax on web' site mostly fills in your tax forms itself and asks you for corrections. For a lot of the population, these corrections are minor to none, e.g. some of the smaller charity deductions are missing.

icedchai2• 6 years ago

Mortgage companies already report interest to the IRS. Student loans, also.

wl• 6 years ago

1 and 2. Governments maintain vital records. It would not be a leap for them to report changes to the IRS.

3. Mortgage companies already report mortgage interest to the IRS on form 1098. Not much of a leap for mortgage companies to keep track of whether a mortgage is on someone's primary residence and report that.

4. The IRS has this information from form 1098-E.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

You don't need a warrant to get personal information held by third parties who willingly hand it over. The IRS isn't in the wrong here legally. If Congress actually cared they'd enact real data privacy laws with teeth.

Drunk_Engineer• 6 years ago

Supreme Court (Carpenter v. United States) says otherwise.

pc867• 6 years ago

As another comment stated, this is only for CSLI data. Tracking data from a different third party is still fair game, and that's what the IRS was/is using.

rhacker• 6 years ago

It's ridiculous that our best reference for what is legal or not is a supreme court ruling these days.

t-writescode• 6 years ago

Wasn’t the point of their comment “that give that data willingly”? If a company is constantly giving tips by choice, why wouldn’t the government be allowed to use it? Is the law written in such a way that the government can’t politely ask / be snitched to? I thought everything was fair game if a polite request was made and accepted.

I completely disagree with what they should be allowed to ask politely for; but, isn’t that the state of the world?

voxic11• 6 years ago

Maybe if this was 2017, but as of Carpenter v. United States the third party doctrine no longer extends to historical cellphone location records.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

tomnipotent• 6 years ago

This applies to CSLI data only - if it's coming from another source (e.g. 3rd party tracking), not in violation.

gruez2• 6 years ago

It's great that the government is being investigated for their actions, but it's a shame that it's seemingly limited to the IRS and not the various law enforcement agencies (eg. FBI/NSA/DHS). I guess the latter gets a free pass because "terrorism" and the former less politically popular (as evidenced by the budget cuts, despite having a net positive ROI on its budget).

hammock2• 6 years ago

IRS is a law enforcement agency

xbar• 6 years ago

Hence, they carry guns and sometimes shoot people. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-10-09-me-43884-....

mtgx• 6 years ago

Didn't Obama sign an executive order days before he left office, expanding raw Upstream data access to 17 agencies, in total, including IRS?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/days-before-trump-takes-office...

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

These days municipal police departments are running their own Stingray-type towers, too.

AnthonyMouse3• 6 years ago

despite having a net positive ROI on its budget

This is a common trope but is hugely misleading.

The issue is that the IRS can spend e.g. $40 on enforcement to collect $100. But what they're really doing is auditing several totally innocent people to find someone who has significantly underpaid and covers the costs of the audits for the others. The problem with this is that it imposes expensive and extremely stressful audits on several totally innocent people, and if you count their side of the cost, the "profits" are totally destroyed. The taxpayer has a better expected value to eat the cost of a certain amount of tax fraud than to pay the higher cost of a certain number of fruitless audits.

Moreover, the purpose of the IRS is to collect money to fund government programs, not to collect money to fund IRS audits. The money spent doing audits is a dead-weight loss which can't go to programs. Meanwhile the ordinary IRS collection efficiency is >99%. Inverting that and doing audits until the efficiency fell to zero would be a tremendous increase in inefficiency and dead-weight losses, but that's where you would be if the metric was "positive ROI" from the perspective of the IRS.

gruez2• 6 years ago

But what they're really doing is auditing several totally innocent people to find someone who has significantly underpaid and covers the costs of the audits for the others.

Is that's what's happening though? Although the budget cuts have reduced the amount of audits across the board, audits of the rich has dropped faster than everyone else[1]. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that the rich has benefited from this policy more than the average joe.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted

dasudasu2• 6 years ago

Tax fraud takes hold when people think an audit isn't that likely. It's not that simple. There is a hidden deterrence benefit.

trident1000• 6 years ago

This government under any administration seems to have a real problem with obeying the constitution which tells them to fuck off. Asset forfeiture, abusing fisa courts, NSA, wiretapping political opponents, forced lock-downs, stop and frisk.

The issue is there is no repercussion for doing something unconstitutional and having a court strike you down years later. Prison time fixes this calculus fast; there should be new legislation on this ideally.

colejohnson664• 6 years ago

Practically no one in Congress would introduce a bill to do so because they (almost certainly) would be afraid it could be used on themselves. That’s my guess anyways.

pc867• 6 years ago

No small part of this boils down to the fact that we have career politicians, who have never once held a real job, and that's not what was envisioned when the Constitution was written. If you could only rely on a government salary for 6 months out of the year, or if you could only hold any government job for 5-6 years in a row before being forced back into the private sector, a lot of problems we have with the government deciding it knows better than the Constitution would go away.

I'm not saying we wouldn't have a host of other problems.

pgoggijr• 6 years ago

How is this different from them calling up a known associate and asking them for my location?

Until there is real privacy enforcement here, and it's clear that location data is owned by the person being tracked and not some third party that happens to have their hands on it, I don't see this pattern going away.

hammock2• 6 years ago

How is this different from them calling up a known associate and asking them for my location?

Would that be legal without a warrant?

javagram• 6 years ago

Yes you don’t need a warrant to interview witnesses or associates.

MereInterest• 6 years ago

I see a difference in scale. Calling up one associate to ask on one person's location on a single date is one thing. Calling up every person in the country to ask on their location throughout the last year is something else entirely.

I think privacy should be seen as a spectrum, not just a binary private/public.

jldugger• 6 years ago

"Defund the police" is already big in political parties, as long as its the 'tax police.'

x87678r• 6 years ago

So My Cell Company, FB/Google, all the ad trackers and hedge funds know where I am but govt isn't allowed to?

IRS should write an app...

comeonseriously• 6 years ago

Or set a precedent, change/create laws, etc with the IRS, then go from there.

pc867• 6 years ago

The idea that you have certain Constitutional rights that the government isn't allowed to mess with but private companies are is well established and has been known and accepted for centuries.

LudwigNagasena• 6 years ago

You can (in theory) choose not to use your cell company, FB and Google. But you can’t choose not to use IRS.

undersuit4• 6 years ago

But you can’t choose not to use IRS.

Just don't make enough income to interact with them. You don't have to be paid above $19,700 a year, you choose to be paid.

jtbayly• 6 years ago

So the IRS isn't allowed to buy this data, but I am?

dragonwriter3• 6 years ago

Yes, in the US there are lots of Constitutional protections that apply only against the government.

darksaints• 6 years ago

It's a shame that we don't have criminal charges for government employees that violate the 4th amendment. As it is structured, the government has the incentive to test their boundaries constantly, as there is no risk in doing so. The worst that can happen is any actions they take on such information gets thrown out in court.

That isn't a disincentive...they can continue to violate the law, because there is nothing stopping them...merely laws that prevent them from using the illegally acquired information if the defendant has a competent lawyer. But never a penalty for illegally acquiring the information in the first place.

refurb• 6 years ago

Random question - but just because it violates the constitution, that doesn’t necessarily make it a crime, correct? In other words, the Constitution limits the government from unreasonable search, but it doesn’t proscribe a punishment if it’s violated. You’d need a separate law for that?

TT33512• 6 years ago

Strictly speaking this is correct. Even in cases of treason, the only crime defined in the Constitution:

"The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."

octoberfranklin4• 6 years ago

If it violates the constitution then the government employee loses their protection from Title 18, Section 242. That is what makes it a crime.

https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-l...

...acts under "color of law" include ... acts done beyond the bounds of that official's lawful authority, if the acts are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties.

bogwog• 6 years ago

Wouldn't there also be fines, or at least compensation for those affected?

jariel2• 6 years ago

If the laws were perfectly clear and the agency were in clear violation, that would be one thing.

But often it's not, and like anything, the way we do it is figure it out in court. Which is crazy but that's it.

Our system 'incentivizes rule testing' because it's the only way to find out where the boundaries are.

It's ridiculous: the best lawyers in the world enact laws that are summarily overthrown by other lawyers who are Judges. That shouldn't be possible.

It would be cool if lawmakers and the judiciary had a way of finding the limits without having to test them and wait years in court.

We have to spend 10 years for the courts to decide what the hell we meant when we wrote copyright law? It's just dumb.

At very least, for national security we could have a Judicial oversight team who can maybe make rulings and then clear actions before they are taken.

octoberfranklin4• 6 years ago

Unclear laws should be nullified, not patched by judges.

After a few nullifications the legislators will learn to be more careful. Painful but positive process.

But, but, but, muh criminalz amok! You say. And yet convictions are thrown out all the time for unlawful searches.

dragonwriter3• 6 years ago

It's a shame that we don't have criminal charges for government employees that violate the 4th amendment

We do. See, e.g., 18 USC 241, Conspiracy against rights, and 18 USC 242, Deprivation of rights under color of law.

Its just that the people who would prosecute those charges are often not inclined to do so for federal government agents doing so as a matter of policy rather than as rogue actors.

busterarm• 6 years ago

How many times is the IRS going to get caught with its hand in the cookie jar? Last time it was our medical records after ACA.

uncletammy• 6 years ago

Once again Ron Wyden seems to be one of the only members of congress who sees the dangerous path we are on with respect to data privacy and our government's Orwellian overreach. I would quit job tomorrow to work on this guy's presidential campaign.

TT33512• 6 years ago

Do we need another 71 year old running for office? I'm not so sure

IG_Semmelweiss• 6 years ago

It used to be until really recently that we showed respect for our elders.

In 7000 years of existence, most major cultures that survived gave hero-like status and higher offices to elders that survived to old age.

They were the source of knowledge, experience and truth.

It is only in our degenerate times in which we think 71yr olds are more than a hindrance and less of an asset.

We turn around and instead give a platform to a 15 year old Greta who could not even narrate what it is like to have a baby and has no clue about life. We send 18yr olds to collegr to criticize the foundations of western society. They are still living off their parent's dime.

We are truly in a mess

Our country is truly destined to fail

actionowl• 6 years ago

get 'em!

The IRS is being investigated for using location data without a warrant

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