Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 386 posts

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#291

Post by jkhdigital »

austincheney wrote: post #171
nostromo wrote: post #8

We need a Supreme Court ruling or law that says if the government doesn’t have a warrant to collect your data, they also can’t buy it from third parties. We also need privacy protections so these companies wouldn’t exist in the first place.

Why? I understand the subject is unpleasant but I don't see anything that remotely qualifies as legal over reach. Users must sign a consent statement to a terms of services agreement. That is a voluntary action where users erode their own privacy protections and surrender their contributions. Anything that happens later is completely incidental and solely between the data owner (which is not the user) and the third p…

Irrelevant to the 4th amendment. A service's TOS does not absolve the government of its constitutional prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. Buying data from a 3rd party service is still a search and seizure, much like paying a hitman is still first-degree murder. The question is whether it is reasonable.

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#292

Post by jkhdigital »

ineedasername wrote: post #182

Unfortunately, this isn't really the Fed's buying their way around the 4th amendment as the article states: it's people selling away their 4th amendment rights by giving their personal data & right to resell it to companies that will sell to anyone with the cash to buy it.

I'd recommend doing some reading on constitutional law and specifically interpretations of the 4th amendment. One cannot "sell" their 4th amendment right, because the text of the amendment places obligations on the government. The act of buying 3rd party data is tantamount to a search and seizure, regardless of whatever TOS was signed by the user who provided that data.

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#293

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

jkhdigital wrote: post #287
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A search involves compulsion. Exclusively? That's a novel interpretation of 4A. Where did you get it?

I get the impression that a majority of the commenters here are (somehow) not aware that there is a deep body of legal precedent interpreting 4A.

I think that's a sound assessment.

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#294

Post by mattrighetti »

dmead wrote: post #269
literallyaduck wrote: post #165

Don't like it? Organizations like the EFF have been working to stop overreach: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/eff-fincen-stop-pushin... You can help financially, and contact each of your representatives and senators and request they act to stop this end run around the constitution.

Is this over reach? Seems like it would be good for the treasury to go after tax dodgers and money launderers.

They have other means that won’t have an impact on everyone when it’s not necessary

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#295

Post by jkhdigital »

cjcole wrote: post #73

It seems apparent that the US government is pursuing a novel strategy to route around the Bill of Rights: Steps: * Allow (and encourage) private sector monopolies to form * Use its leverage and influence to "encourage" those monopolies to do things which the US government is not allowed to do (examples: censorship, data collection) The list of First Amendment precedents, for example, with respect to the government is…

Kind of reminds me of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The discretionary federal budget averages like 8% of the economy--that is an ungodly amount of economic resources that can be directed to private entities to accomplish basically anything the government wants to do, regardless of what the Constitution dictates.

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#296

Post by hhaha88 »

literallyaduck wrote: post #165

Don't like it? Organizations like the EFF have been working to stop overreach: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/eff-fincen-stop-pushin... You can help financially, and contact each of your representatives and senators and request they act to stop this end run around the constitution.

Who is working to stop corporate overreach?

I don’t really understand why the species should put its faith in industrialist billionaires given the history.

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#297

Post by jkhdigital »

pjmorris wrote: post #68
motohagiography wrote: post #32

If one sees the U.S. constitution and its amendments merely as dated conventions, there is no reason for the IRS and other agencies not to leverage tech to drive enforcement numbers, and for the agencies themselves to just become the policy levers they want to have. However, there are others who believe the rules are in place to prevent this precise type of eventuality, where a technological change shifts the balance…

> There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people in government without accountability as leverage against you personally. I have one small revision: There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people without accountability as leverage against you personally.

> people without accountability

The difference is that the government is, in some sense, unaccountable by fiat. At least with private actors we can have the possibility of accountability through legal recourse.

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#298

Post by fragmede »

mmcdermott wrote: post #190
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good chance the Constitution covers this now. What we need are uncompromised courts to hear and rule on 4A violations.

I'd agree that the 4th Amendment ought to cover it. It isn't unambiguous, though. It isn't hard to see how a lawyer could point out that "and to forever secure the people, their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against all unreasonable searches and seizures under the guise of law" says nothing about purchasing data from a 3rd party. This wasn't really something that would have come up in the 18th century. Extend…

The intentions that 3rd party has changed, but having a PI follow a suspect, or coercing (with money or threats) a CI to provide information predates computers and the Internet and probably the Industrial Revolution as a police tactic by a huge margin.

Purchasing "data" from a 3rd party is a modern Internet spin, but it's not like the concept is brand new to the law or the legal department.

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#299

Post by lixtra »

jkhdigital wrote: post #292
ineedasername wrote: post #182

Unfortunately, this isn't really the Fed's buying their way around the 4th amendment as the article states: it's people selling away their 4th amendment rights by giving their personal data & right to resell it to companies that will sell to anyone with the cash to buy it.

I'd recommend doing some reading on constitutional law and specifically interpretations of the 4th amendment. One cannot "sell" their 4th amendment right, because the text of the amendment places obligations on the government . The act of buying 3rd party data is tantamount to a search and seizure, regardless of whatever TOS was signed by the user who provided that data.

One could argue that the data becomes public, after it became sellable.

I’m all for the 4th. But restraining law enforcement not to use public data?

Now should it be so easy to give up your rights to your data is a different question.

Re: The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

#300

Post by Jensson »

jkhdigital wrote: post #267
ukd1 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, nothing is being searched or seized here; it seems like people gave up their personal data, ignored or didn't read a ToS, and companies are selling it - not being forced to give it up. I don't like it, but does it mean it's illegal?

The government purchasing this data is tantamount to a search. There's quite a bit of precedent on this, much of which was needed after telephones became ubiquitous. Just because the electrical signals carrying a private conversation pass through wires that are owned by a third party does not make the conversation public. Similarly, just because internet traffic is observable by anyone with a network tap does not mea…

> Just because the electrical signals carrying a private conversation pass through wires that are owned by a third party does not make the conversation public

Without data protection laws that data isn't your private data, that data is the company's data. And you are free to do whatever you want with your data, and since the company owns this data the company can sell it to the government, it doesn't matter if you consider it to be your private data the company still owns it. Europe has GDPR which clarifies this, the data is yours even if it is stored on company servers, I'm not aware of USA having anything similar except for health data.

So to me it sounds like you'd want USA to create something akin to GDPR.

Post reply on HN