Government agencies buy commercial data about Americans in bulk

Post by estimator7292 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

mentalgear wrote: post #54

_vere wrote: post #27

Netzpolitik.org actually reported on what you can do with this type of data a while ago. They tricked a databroker into getting a free sample of geolocation data, 3.6 billion datapoints. They were able to build individual movement profiles for people and link that with real identities by putting just a little bit of work in. For a government with access to stuff like palantir this would mean a full movement profile f…

I remember some journalists used (currently legal) meta-data from data brokers to track the movement of some politicians and later confronted them with it: they were now very much opposed to this being legal. Now, it seems like someone would need to do that for capital hill .. and then make sure politicians are not voting a law that only exempts them from meta data collection and usage.

Post by kaleinator » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

eeixlk wrote: post #71

LurkandComment wrote: post #69

I am a big personal privacy advocate. However, I'm also well aware of how much crime is happening online and on signals that don't sit clearly in public and private channels. If you worked with this stuff like I do, you'd understand gov't and le needs more regualted and responsible access to this data. At the same time, if you're in Brazil (FE) there is no need for Facebook to comply to your warrant request. So how d…

So the US federal government will combat romance scams by violating random citizens privacy when it cant stop the president from conducting stock market manipulation scams on twitter? Institutional trust needs to be earned and maintained.

Post by bloomingeek » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

plagiarist wrote: post #57

mattsimpson wrote: post #6

Not enough people are talking about this. It seems to me like the vast majority of people just don't care, primarily because they don't understand the ways it could dramatically impact them in the future. Short term thinking is a scary phenomenon.

"I don't have anything to hide," sort of foolishness.

Post by ethersteeds » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

ambicapter wrote: post #68

sdoering wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but here you go. OP had it slightly wrong though: it's not tavern records but membership lists of colonial Boston organizations, and the author is a sociology professor (Kieran Healy), not from Princeton or Harvard. He uses basic social network analysis on historical membership data to identify Paul Revere as the key figure among 254 colonists using nothing but "metadata." The whole thing is written as a sati…

Isn't he also making the point that's a very effective way to triangulate the leaders of an org? That's just going to reinforce the NSA's inclination to do so.

Post by taurath » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

estimator7292 wrote: post #72

mentalgear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember some journalists used (currently legal) meta-data from data brokers to track the movement of some politicians and later confronted them with it: they were now very much opposed to this being legal. Now, it seems like someone would need to do that for capital hill .. and then make sure politicians are not voting a law that only exempts them from meta data collection and usage.

Someone really should put up a website that tracks US politicians' locations in real time. It's clear that our government only cares when directly and personally threatened.