10 ms·

Military intelligence buys location data instead of getting warrants

225 points by lazycrazyowl 6y ago

imgabe 6y ago
Why would the military get a warrant? They're not law enforcement.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  The fourth amendment applies to the state, not just law enforcement.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > The fourth amendment applies to the state, not just law enforcement In principle, yes. In practice, due to the absence of meaningful remedies other than the exclusionary rule, not so much. Rules are only as strong as the consequences for breaking them. (But this doesn't seem to be a violation, anyway; data in a custody of a third party that is legally permitted to sell it publicly is neither being searched nor seized when it is purchased in a mutually-voluntary exchange by the state.)
  - imgabe 6y ago
    The fourth amendment is to protect you against being arrested and deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. A warrant is part of the process in making sure that an arrest is justified. Intelligence agencies have no authority to arrest you, nor would they have any interest in doing so. Their job is to gather information about what other countries are doing that might be harmful to the US. Even then, I think warrants generally aren't required for publicly available information.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > The fourth amendment is to protect you against being arrested and deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. Privacy is liberty and property is property. Unreasonable search and seizure is unreasonable and prohibited (even if there is no current effective remedy) in all cases, not just criminal justice. > Even then, I think warrants generally aren't required for publicly available information. This does seem to be the decisive issue in this specific case.
      - salawat 6y ago
        Welcome to Third Party Doctrine. A.K.A how to do an end run around the constitution by laundering the data collection to private entities.
      - vkou 6y ago
        > Privacy is liberty and property is property. Unreasonable search and seizure is unreasonable and prohibited (even if there is no current effective remedy) in all cases, not just criminal justice. Your water utility voluntarily selling information about your water usage to the government is not unreasonable search and seizure, and does not deprive you of any property. I don't think you're going to meet a lot of legal success by framing privacy in this context.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  If only we lived in a world without parrallel construction where military intelligence organazitions didn't spy on citizens for law enforcement
  - mattr47 6y ago
    It is not so much as spying for law enforcement, but spying to protect their power. The military industrial complex invented the boogeyman and use their intelligence arm to promote it.
sneak 6y ago
US military intelligence already believes that they don't need warrants; they've decided (in a secret, internal opinion) via the (again, secret) FISA court that the FISA Amendments Act, section 702, permits them to retrieve data on anyone they like directly from the service providers, even if those people are suspected of no crime, and are citizens/residents of the US. This has been going on for fourteen years, since Microsoft became the first partner in the program on (lol) 11th September, 2007, and started giving them dumps of people's hotmail email boxes and such. It's the #1 source for NSA reporting, eclipsing even their bulk cable wiretaps. They can hit a button and get Google Takeout, but for all major US online services, for anyone they choose, no warrant required. These sorts of headlines pretend that their "normal" way of spying does require warrants. It absolutely does not. A lot of people seem to still carry the misconception that the FISA orders (again, not warrants, no probable cause, issued by a classified court (also run by US military intelligence) that never denies a request) are only for foreigners ("foreign" is right in the name). That's also not true: they use it to target US citizens too. This specific circumstance was cited by Ed Snowden as one of the main reasons he came forward and told everyone that this was happening. https://www.eff.org/702-spying https://www.eff.org/702-spying The participants in this system as of 2013: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/prism-slides-nsa-document https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/pr...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Why should they need a warrant for information that's being sold or public?
  - sneak 6y ago
    The contents of your Gmail inbox or Facebook DMs are neither.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Because of this: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
_trampeltier 6y ago
Not really news, every month there is an article about an agency, the police or wherever who buy location data. Sad times ..
tppiotrowski 6y ago
Does this mean that if I give you my cellphone number, you would be able to pay money to see my current or past location? My understanding was that cell phone companies sell data in aggregate but not for individual numbers.
- corty 6y ago
  > My understanding was that cell phone companies sell data in aggregate but not for individual numbers. Santa Claus has a bridge to sell you ;) Even if there are no official channels, I'm sure there are informants willing to sell that data for the right price.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  No, unaggregated, real-time data is available. It percolated all the way down to bounty hunters before it really came to public knowledge. https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunters-att-tmobile-sprint-customer-location-data-years https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunte...
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    I didn't know about that. It seems like there is much less public attention on what these companies are doing compared to tech companies.
    - username90 6y ago
      Because tech companies are still relatively ethical, you wouldn't have so many leaks otherwise.
      - throwaway45349 6y ago
        Agreed, a lot of tech might be data harvesters, but they don't sell location data to bounty hunters.
  - tppiotrowski 6y ago
some_random 6y ago
Utterly unsurprising. The idea that the military will accept having less freedom of action than a private company is absurd and was never going to last. Honestly, I'm not sure why people care so much about the US government having access to this data while simultaneously not caring that any entity with a sufficiently large bank account can get it. Maybe it's because so many of the people here work at the businesses that generate this data?
- DenisM 6y ago
  The government has more guns than your garden variety rich guy.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    More to the point, the government has the socially assigned role of deciding whether anyone’s use of said guns is legal or not.
  - some_random 6y ago
    I _wish_ guns were required to cause harm to others.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    I love the presence of this talking point here because its usefulness is self-refuting in this case. 1. To guard against tyranny, always focus more on government overreach than corporate overreach because the government is the one with the guns. 2. Corporations scooping up endless streams of data don't get the same level of scrutiny and pithy talking points from libertarians as the entity with the guns. 3. Class of data-mining corporations collect so much data that it's functionally equivalent to a tyrannical government demanding direct access to everyone's location data. 4. The government-- the entity with the guns that we want to protect ourselves against-- simply buys access to the data from corporations to get around the law. 5. We've done a poor job of guarding against tyranny! Edit: clarification
- salawat 6y ago
  Oh, people do care about that part. It's just that the capability to reatrain that organization is highly constrained through the Government edifice. That the overnment edifice itself is at the center of the problem is even more cause for alarm.
tppiotrowski 6y ago
"If your mobile device is turned on, our network is collecting data about the device location. We may use, provide access to, or disclose this network location data without your approval to provide and support our Services, including to route wireless communications, operate and improve our network and business, detect and prevent fraud, provide information to emergency responders about where to find you when you call public safety agencies, including through 911 or similar emergency services numbers, or as required by law." [1] The wording here seems to suggest they can only use it for diagnosing their T-Mobile network, to emergency services or as required by law. Where is the loophole? [1] https://www.t-mobile.com/privacy-center/our-practices/privacy-policy https://www.t-mobile.com/privacy-center/our-practices/privac...
- salawat 6y ago
  >operate and improve our network and business >and business Loophole is right there. The improvement of their business can be interpreted as anything. Winning a government project, PR win, getting rid of a meddlesome or unsavory customer, supporting an unpopular government action to avoid unpleasant consequences.... All of those fall under improving their business. Generally speaking, any phrase not explicitly defined and constrained in any sort of legal document is where you go to start looking for wiggle room.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  I can only assume that the loophole lies in "without your approval". I have not read disclosures from them in forever so I can't readily confirm it, but that would suggest your approval is basically agreeing to use their service.
- paxys 6y ago
  > The DIA explains in the memo that it simply does not think the Carpenter ruling applies to it. "DIA does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially-available data for intelligence purposes," the agency wrote. "DIA's acquisition, use, and storage of commercial geolocation data is governed" not by these civilian law enforcement rules but by the DoD's own "Attorney General-approved data handling requirements." If the DoD thinks it has the right to this data then whatever agreement you have with T-Mobile doesn't really matter. Ultimately that is what needs to be challenged in court.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
Petition your congresspeople to make it illegal to buy location data.
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  > congresspeople Sigh. Political correctness needs to die.
01100011 6y ago
Can private citizens buy the data? How? If I wanted to buy my own records, how would I do it? Do I need to buy a large batch of records or can the request be tailored?
- tppiotrowski 6y ago
  "The supply chain of that location data is not as simple as me just going to T-Mobile, buying the data and then getting it there. There are various organizations, companies in a trickle down effect." [1] [1] https://youtu.be/3e6n7jDDmj0?t=240 https://youtu.be/3e6n7jDDmj0?t=240
djrogers 6y ago
> The DIA "currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones," > The Supreme Court held in its 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling that the government needs an actual search warrant to collect an individual's cell-site location data. These appear on the surface to be 2 separate things. If they’re not buying “an individual's cell-site location data” then they are not circumventing the warrant process. If a judge rules that aggregate metadata also requires a warrant (which I’d be ok with) then we have a path to object here.
- count 6y ago
  Buying a commercial service and compelling disclosure of otherwise confidential data are pretty substantially different things (not a value judgement on if this is a good idea either way, just a comment on the difference).
jariel 6y ago
Another way to put this: "Data available to anyone, that might otherwise require a warrant"
bergstromm466 6y ago
Aren't they plugged into all of Silicon Valley through PRISM, and 'logging into' high-risk targets' pc's through Intel ME? Is this some sort of glitzy distraction piece for that? Last I heard, Snowden is still scapegoated, and nobody from the NSA has been held accountable, or anyone inside any of these other 3 letter government agencies...

225 points by lazycrazyowl 6y ago

imgabe 6y ago

Why would the military get a warrant? They're not law enforcement.

ceejayoz 6y ago
The fourth amendment applies to the state, not just law enforcement.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The fourth amendment applies to the state, not just law enforcement In principle, yes. In practice, due to the absence of meaningful remedies other than the exclusionary rule, not so much. Rules are only as strong as the consequences for breaking them. (But this doesn't seem to be a violation, anyway; data in a custody of a third party that is legally permitted to sell it publicly is neither being searched nor seized when it is purchased in a mutually-voluntary exchange by the state.)
- imgabe 6y ago
  The fourth amendment is to protect you against being arrested and deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. A warrant is part of the process in making sure that an arrest is justified. Intelligence agencies have no authority to arrest you, nor would they have any interest in doing so. Their job is to gather information about what other countries are doing that might be harmful to the US. Even then, I think warrants generally aren't required for publicly available information.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > The fourth amendment is to protect you against being arrested and deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. Privacy is liberty and property is property. Unreasonable search and seizure is unreasonable and prohibited (even if there is no current effective remedy) in all cases, not just criminal justice. > Even then, I think warrants generally aren't required for publicly available information. This does seem to be the decisive issue in this specific case.
    - salawat 6y ago
      Welcome to Third Party Doctrine. A.K.A how to do an end run around the constitution by laundering the data collection to private entities.
    - vkou 6y ago
      > Privacy is liberty and property is property. Unreasonable search and seizure is unreasonable and prohibited (even if there is no current effective remedy) in all cases, not just criminal justice. Your water utility voluntarily selling information about your water usage to the government is not unreasonable search and seizure, and does not deprive you of any property. I don't think you're going to meet a lot of legal success by framing privacy in this context.
thatguy0900 6y ago
If only we lived in a world without parrallel construction where military intelligence organazitions didn't spy on citizens for law enforcement
- mattr47 6y ago
  It is not so much as spying for law enforcement, but spying to protect their power. The military industrial complex invented the boogeyman and use their intelligence arm to promote it.

sneak 6y ago

US military intelligence already believes that they don't need warrants; they've decided (in a secret, internal opinion) via the (again, secret) FISA court that the FISA Amendments Act, section 702, permits them to retrieve data on anyone they like directly from the service providers, even if those people are suspected of no crime, and are citizens/residents of the US. This has been going on for fourteen years, since Microsoft became the first partner in the program on (lol) 11th September, 2007, and started giving them dumps of people's hotmail email boxes and such. It's the #1 source for NSA reporting, eclipsing even their bulk cable wiretaps. They can hit a button and get Google Takeout, but for all major US online services, for anyone they choose, no warrant required. These sorts of headlines pretend that their "normal" way of spying does require warrants. It absolutely does not. A lot of people seem to still carry the misconception that the FISA orders (again, not warrants, no probable cause, issued by a classified court (also run by US military intelligence) that never denies a request) are only for foreigners ("foreign" is right in the name). That's also not true: they use it to target US citizens too. This specific circumstance was cited by Ed Snowden as one of the main reasons he came forward and told everyone that this was happening. https://www.eff.org/702-spying https://www.eff.org/702-spying The participants in this system as of 2013: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/prism-slides-nsa-document https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/pr...

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
Why should they need a warrant for information that's being sold or public?
- sneak 6y ago
  The contents of your Gmail inbox or Facebook DMs are neither.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Because of this: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

_trampeltier 6y ago

Not really news, every month there is an article about an agency, the police or wherever who buy location data. Sad times ..

tppiotrowski 6y ago

Does this mean that if I give you my cellphone number, you would be able to pay money to see my current or past location? My understanding was that cell phone companies sell data in aggregate but not for individual numbers.

corty 6y ago
> My understanding was that cell phone companies sell data in aggregate but not for individual numbers. Santa Claus has a bridge to sell you ;) Even if there are no official channels, I'm sure there are informants willing to sell that data for the right price.
roywiggins 6y ago
No, unaggregated, real-time data is available. It percolated all the way down to bounty hunters before it really came to public knowledge. https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunters-att-tmobile-sprint-customer-location-data-years https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunte...
- ma2rten 6y ago
  I didn't know about that. It seems like there is much less public attention on what these companies are doing compared to tech companies.
  - username90 6y ago
    Because tech companies are still relatively ethical, you wouldn't have so many leaks otherwise.
    - throwaway45349 6y ago
      Agreed, a lot of tech might be data harvesters, but they don't sell location data to bounty hunters.
- tppiotrowski 6y ago

some_random 6y ago

Utterly unsurprising. The idea that the military will accept having less freedom of action than a private company is absurd and was never going to last. Honestly, I'm not sure why people care so much about the US government having access to this data while simultaneously not caring that any entity with a sufficiently large bank account can get it. Maybe it's because so many of the people here work at the businesses that generate this data?

DenisM 6y ago
The government has more guns than your garden variety rich guy.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  More to the point, the government has the socially assigned role of deciding whether anyone’s use of said guns is legal or not.
- some_random 6y ago
  I _wish_ guns were required to cause harm to others.
- jancsika 6y ago
  I love the presence of this talking point here because its usefulness is self-refuting in this case. 1. To guard against tyranny, always focus more on government overreach than corporate overreach because the government is the one with the guns. 2. Corporations scooping up endless streams of data don't get the same level of scrutiny and pithy talking points from libertarians as the entity with the guns. 3. Class of data-mining corporations collect so much data that it's functionally equivalent to a tyrannical government demanding direct access to everyone's location data. 4. The government-- the entity with the guns that we want to protect ourselves against-- simply buys access to the data from corporations to get around the law. 5. We've done a poor job of guarding against tyranny! Edit: clarification
salawat 6y ago
Oh, people do care about that part. It's just that the capability to reatrain that organization is highly constrained through the Government edifice. That the overnment edifice itself is at the center of the problem is even more cause for alarm.

tppiotrowski 6y ago

"If your mobile device is turned on, our network is collecting data about the device location. We may use, provide access to, or disclose this network location data without your approval to provide and support our Services, including to route wireless communications, operate and improve our network and business, detect and prevent fraud, provide information to emergency responders about where to find you when you call public safety agencies, including through 911 or similar emergency services numbers, or as required by law." [1] The wording here seems to suggest they can only use it for diagnosing their T-Mobile network, to emergency services or as required by law. Where is the loophole? [1] https://www.t-mobile.com/privacy-center/our-practices/privacy-policy https://www.t-mobile.com/privacy-center/our-practices/privac...

salawat 6y ago
>operate and improve our network and business >and business Loophole is right there. The improvement of their business can be interpreted as anything. Winning a government project, PR win, getting rid of a meddlesome or unsavory customer, supporting an unpopular government action to avoid unpleasant consequences.... All of those fall under improving their business. Generally speaking, any phrase not explicitly defined and constrained in any sort of legal document is where you go to start looking for wiggle room.
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I can only assume that the loophole lies in "without your approval". I have not read disclosures from them in forever so I can't readily confirm it, but that would suggest your approval is basically agreeing to use their service.
paxys 6y ago
> The DIA explains in the memo that it simply does not think the Carpenter ruling applies to it. "DIA does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially-available data for intelligence purposes," the agency wrote. "DIA's acquisition, use, and storage of commercial geolocation data is governed" not by these civilian law enforcement rules but by the DoD's own "Attorney General-approved data handling requirements." If the DoD thinks it has the right to this data then whatever agreement you have with T-Mobile doesn't really matter. Ultimately that is what needs to be challenged in court.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

Petition your congresspeople to make it illegal to buy location data.

ARandomerDude 6y ago
> congresspeople Sigh. Political correctness needs to die.

01100011 6y ago

Can private citizens buy the data? How? If I wanted to buy my own records, how would I do it? Do I need to buy a large batch of records or can the request be tailored?

tppiotrowski 6y ago
"The supply chain of that location data is not as simple as me just going to T-Mobile, buying the data and then getting it there. There are various organizations, companies in a trickle down effect." [1] [1] https://youtu.be/3e6n7jDDmj0?t=240 https://youtu.be/3e6n7jDDmj0?t=240

djrogers 6y ago

> The DIA "currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones," > The Supreme Court held in its 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling that the government needs an actual search warrant to collect an individual's cell-site location data. These appear on the surface to be 2 separate things. If they’re not buying “an individual's cell-site location data” then they are not circumventing the warrant process. If a judge rules that aggregate metadata also requires a warrant (which I’d be ok with) then we have a path to object here.

count 6y ago
Buying a commercial service and compelling disclosure of otherwise confidential data are pretty substantially different things (not a value judgement on if this is a good idea either way, just a comment on the difference).

jariel 6y ago

Another way to put this: "Data available to anyone, that might otherwise require a warrant"

bergstromm466 6y ago

Aren't they plugged into all of Silicon Valley through PRISM, and 'logging into' high-risk targets' pc's through Intel ME? Is this some sort of glitzy distraction piece for that? Last I heard, Snowden is still scapegoated, and nobody from the NSA has been held accountable, or anyone inside any of these other 3 letter government agencies...