The Feds Are Skirting the 4th Amendment by Buying Data from Tech Companies

https://reason.com/2024/08/20/how-the-feds-buy-their-way-around-the-fourth-amendment/

by BenFranklin100 • 2 years ago

47 10 2 years ago

reason.com

BenFranklin100• 2 years ago

Profile users, sell to the Feds, profit. Nice business model.

throw109202• 2 years ago

Tucked into the article is this hilarious nugget:

and paying an Amtrak official for travel reservation information. In the latter case, the DEA already had an agreement in place under which Amtrak Police would provide that information for free, but the agency instead spent $850,000 over two decades paying somebody off

I wonder if this was corruption or plain incompetence/miscommunication - seems like if you have lots of "vendors" that you transact with, if you don't use some centralized system of truth, then you're liable to have stuff like this happen occasionally.

mrusme• 2 years ago

Maybe the content of what their official agreement provided differed to what the tip-off was offering.

josefritzishere• 2 years ago

The boundary between incompetence and common corruption is as yet unmapped.

Rick76• 2 years ago

Thats why they don't like it when TikTok does it. Devalues Facebook and Google

throw109202• 2 years ago

Very good point!

The best answer to "ban tiktok" (which I think is good for many reasons, including data collection like this and mental health), is "... and ban data collection like this too, right?"

I think that both of those things would be beneficial for the public - and you can use the response to this point to judge whether someone actually cares about privacy or just wants data collection to be limited to their preferred government.

NFVLCP• 2 years ago

Previous thread, specifically a critical question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39137491

Also, if this data is for sale then it's a reasonable bet that other governments have bought it too (i.e., Russia, China, etc). Is that "legal", then? What's the difference?

lesuorac2• 2 years ago

Well, the critical answer had a very large flaw in it.

The 4th amendment mostly prohibits seizures by the government. It has nothing to do with what the government is allowed to have [1].

Private data is not protected by the 4th amendment anymore than public data is. The government may not seize your private data without a warrant. This applies to say Equifax as well, the government cannot seize Equifax's records on you. However, giving Equifax money and Equifax giving data is an exchange / transaction / not a seizure so it doesn't matter.

A much more minor flaw is the argument that "you or I" can't buy this data. 1st because it's just false. Journalists have fun buying this data all the time. 2nd sometimes goods are sold to qualified customers. Try buying a jet fighter; its do-able, people own harriers (just not the guy Pepsi owed one to).

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The sub-point in the critical answer that I think is the much bigger deal is the lack of transparency. Your publicly funded police department should not be able to obscure where they're spending money.

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However, the article brings up an example not address by the critical answer. "This included paying an administrator at a private parcel delivery service to search people's packages and send them to the DEA".

That sounds a lot like a search by the government (or it's agent).

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/

randcraw• 2 years ago

My preferred solution to this is to enforce common carrier constraints against any business that has access to your personal data -- from communication to purchases to telco messages to tracking your geolocation.

Alternately, we could demand that the government get a warrant before acquiring any/all personal info from any source, and prosecute any authority who violates this.

Of course enforcing either option would require a Supreme Court that gives a damn about the principles enshrined in the Constitution, and we learned from Snowden this is absolutely not the case.

lesuorac2• 2 years ago

Eh, there's a reason there's selling location data and not the contents of your phone calls.

It's not the goodness of their hearts, the police would love to have a phone conversation where you describe where the drugs are. Instead the same wire-tapping laws apply to companies _and_ governments. (hence why companies don't record all the calls you make on your corporate phone but sure as shit can search through all your corporate emails).

The Feds Are Skirting the 4th Amendment by Buying Data from Tech Companies

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