Remember when...

 

...privacy from government snooping was a significant issue? Maybe I mean definitely it should be again. Two recent stories tell us why.

 

In the first, 404 Media reported on May 29 that earlier that month, a Texas cop, suspecting that a woman had gotten a self-administered abortion, performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to try to find her. The search included states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois. 

 

A company called Flock markets the cameras, usually marketed to cities and towns to address concerns about local crime or find missing people. Instead, it has become another means for police to conduct sweeping, warrantless surveillance, enabling police in one state to "investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another," in the words of Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund.

 

(Sidebar: I first wrote about ALPRs in 2007 when New York City was about to install its first of them.)

 

The second comes from The Intercept, which reported on May 22 that US intelligence agencies are evading the 4th Amendment and obtaining vast amounts of personal and sensitive information that normally would require a search warrant to obtain.

 

How? Simply by buying it from data brokers, a vast and growing - and largely unregulated - market.

 

But there's a problem: There's too much data for sale from too many sources and oh dear, the spooks can't use it efficiently. So, the article informs us,

[t]he Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information.... The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.”

That data will be available to the 18 separate agencies and offices that comprise the federal intelligence "community" - and perhaps others beyond those. It will also enable use of unreliable, hallucination-prone AI large-language models and pseudoscientific “sentiment analysis,” which claims being able to know someone’s opinion about a topic by analyzing implicit signals in their behavior, movement, or speech.

But don't worry, really - the spooks insist this is just about efficiency and is not any threat to First or Fourth Amendment rights. Really. They mean it this time. They do. Because efficiency in government spying on us is all about freedom.

 

Footnote: The program to establish this "Data Consortium" was started during the Biden administration.