Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#1

Post by G5ANDY » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 6:06 PM UTC

Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data
aclu.org

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#2

Post by vezzy-fnord » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 7:57 PM UTC

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#3

Post by rtpg » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 8:14 PM UTC

Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes

>Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed

This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law.

The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from the FISA court.

Stuff that has come out of these leaks have ranged from banal (oh, we listen to the German Chancelor's cell phone? What else is new) to absolutely damning (forcing companies to hand over SSL keys). But even in the most damning cases, all of these happened within the legal frameworks given to them (such as the National Security Letters) and maybe some overzealous law enforcement agents. The illegal incidents can be explained more by incidents outside of how things are "supposed" to work (LOVEINT is probably not sanctioned by the NSA), and a lack of strong implementation of the framework given by the courts.

The narrative has always seemed to be "check out how the NSA is going crazy over here!". But the reality is "check out how all these politicians are voting in these new laws allowing this to take place!"

From the leaks you can even see how the courts are constantly reeling things in, the system is actually working. We hear about old NSA programs that got shut down because of the FISA court's rulings. This is how rule of law works! We vote laws, and people follow them.

To actually come to this, given all we've seen from how courts rule on this issue in general, and the FISA court's rulings, this sort of data sharing would absolutely definitely not be allowed to exist. No judge would agree to this being allowed to be set in place, as it so obviously goes against 4th ammendement in such a program's intent.

Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell the contents of your e-mails to somebody.

This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#4

Post by rayiner » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 8:16 PM UTC

I understand the importance of focusing on the government, but I think use of this sort of data should be restricted for everyone, not just the government. What happens when employers realize that you can filter out less desirable employees by correlating the movements of their social groups and cross-referencing it against credit history databases? We fear what the government can do with the data, but as a practical matter its corporate America that's more likely to actually screw over large numbers of people with this sort of data.