The National Security Agency (NSA) is purchasing Americans’ internet records, according to government documents made public on Friday. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, wrote a letter claiming the NSA goes through backchannel avenues to purchase your browsing records and location data, which government agencies typically require a search warrant to obtain.
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“The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans’ privacy are not just unethical, but illegal,” said Wyden in a letter to the Director of National Intelligence.
The NSA seems to buy American metadata from “data brokers,” according to the unsealed documents. Popular app developers sell your data to these “shady companies,” as Wyden refers to them, and ultimately sell it to the U.S. Department of Defense. Wyden says he has fought for three years to publicly reveal this information after finding in 2021 that the Defense Intelligence Agency purchases American location data. In the letter, he asks that the U.S. intelligence community obtain data through legal means set forth by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) moving forward.
The FTC declined to speak on the matter.
The metadata the NSA is buying can reveal loads of personal information about you. It can expose if you’ve purchased a gun, where you vote, sensitive medical records, your financial status, and even your sexuality. Typically you’d need to be alerted if this data was breached from where you originally shared it, but through data brokers, this data can end up in all kinds of places, including the NSA.
The unsealed documents contain letters from Ronald Moultrie, United States Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. He writes that the NSA buys commercial data to conduct intelligence or cybersecurity missions. Moultrie says that because this is commercially available data, and is available to foreign adversaries as well, it should be okay to use.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government needs a warrant to access a person’s cellphone location history under the Fourth Amendment. Moultrie states that this does not apply if a government agency purchases data that is commercially available, but that position is disputed by Sen. Wyden.
Unfortunately, it’s not entirely surprising that American data is ending up all over the place. New research this week shows that iPhone apps like Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok are harvesting your data when they send you notifications. It’s the latest development in a long story of your data becoming anything but private.
The unsealed documents don’t explicitly mention apps that are selling your data to data brokers, and it seems that these data brokers are a huge culprit in this scandal as well. The existence of data brokers is not entirely new, as it was previously reported they were selling lists of people with mental health disorders last year.
The NSA has a long history of invasive surveillance techniques that undermine the privacy of American citizens. The curtain of internet privacy is peeled back more and more these days, but this latest development shows just how severe the problem is.