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Using Fourth-Party Data Brokers To Bypass the Fourth Amendment
An anonymous reader writes "Coming out of Columbia Law School is an article about commercial data brokers and their ability to provide information about individuals to the US government despite Fourth Amendment or statutory protections (abstract, full PDF at Download link). Quoting: 'The Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect information that has been voluntarily disclosed to a third-party or obtained by means of a private search. Congress reacted to these holdings by creating a patchwork of statutes designed to prevent the government's direct and unfettered access to documents stored with third-parties; thus, the government's access is fettered by various statutory requirements, including, in many cases, notice of the disclosure. Despite these protections, however, third-parties are not restricted from passing the same data to other private companies (fourth-parties), and after the events of September 11, 2001, the government, believing that it needed a greater scope of surveillance, turned to the fourth-parties to access the personal information it could not acquire on its own. As a consequence, the fourth-parties, unrestricted by Fourth Amendment or statutory concerns, delivered — and continue to deliver — personal data en masse to the government.'"
It's our government, and if it's screwing us it's basically us screwing ourselves.
Non-sequitur and off-topic, has there ever been a media anti-trust action in history?
Cool! Amazing Toys.
This is something that has had me puzzled for quite a while now. Why does the US have this fetish with keeping the government out of their private lives, yet allow corporations free reign to use, misuse, misplace and basically be asses with the same information?
In e.g. Norway all sectors are under the same law, this including corporate, governmental and academic uses. Obviously certain organizations are allowed to store more information than others.
- These characters were randomly selected.
This demonstrates a remarkable failure to understand the article.
The SCOTUS ruled that Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches and seizures doesn't extend to where you voluntarily disclosed the information to a third party. In response to these rulings, Congress passed a statute to prevent the government from overreaching. It appears to have a loophole, and I'm sure in time Congress will fix it.
It's going to be concerned about stuff like this, but making unsubstantiated complaints about veiled illegitimacy is completely counterproductive.
When 'free' web services which are obviously tremendously expensive to maintain and which feature only a token handful of banner ads. . .
I don't know the economics of Facebook and Yahoo and Google, but it certainly seems that there would be a TON of money available for the kind of information they pull in. Do corporations actively resist selling a constantly renewable resource they specifically crafted their web sites and web applications to generate? I have no trouble believing that Facebook is selling everything they glean about you to the highest bidder. It's Google that I find myself wondering about; their "Don't Be Evil" thing is so effective that even I have the slogan burned into my mind.
But do those Google ads REALLY pay for entire data centers and dedicated trunks and hundreds of miles of fiber optics?
Really?
-FL
I am not a Lawyer, but wouldn't this make those agencies contracted to do this by the Government de facto Agents of the Government, and therefore any materials obtained by them in violation of the 4th Amendment poisoned?
Also, wouldn't a judge have to throw out such evidence as its method of gathering is a clear end-run around the Constitution?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
At the most basic, it is a difference between voluntarily sharing the information versus involuntarily having it collected.
Corporations compile the information about your purchases and such in order to persuade you to purchase their products.
Governments compile the information about you in order to limit your freedom.
Loopholes. Always loopholes.
The B.S. in this whole thing, that which stinks, is that whatever they are wordsmithing as 'fourth party' is STILL a 'third party'.
You can't get around it just by renaming it. Everyone on this planet knows the definition of 'third party' is NOT tied to the number of hands something has passed through at all.
WTF, really. Lets get a prosecution on this crap. The new administration is complacent in the old and has done nothing to bring JUSTICE to the US. Remember that, despite how you (and I) may have voted for the promise of a new era of honorable leadership.
Corporations write laws in the US. If a left leaning type starts getting ideas, his or her 'aid' will pull them back in line as they worked for or want to work for the area their boss is to be watching, regulating.
Do you expect to get a great job if your boss was screaming about public health care, land mines, lead, mercenaries having fun with children, drugs and the CIA, water quality ect.
All that is taboo in the USA.
If the advisor fails, the left or right swaps out the right or left with a more corporation friendly person and team.
A man or woman who knows who pays for their lifestyle, elections and a few naughty extras.
If its a mess and mid term, just blackmail or force a recall. Fox will get the "left" trouble maker, the liberal blogosphere the right.
If they are clean, work on the family tree or get someone close to them to make them fail.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
True, but consider the alternative. If the government couldn't collect any information without receiving it directly from citizens or under a subpoena, they wouldn't know shit! At first this sounds nice, but given the mostly advantageous activities of law enforcement, I think I like it more the way it is.
The real 800 pound gorilla in the room is the lack of strong federal privacy laws that dictate what corporations may do with our information. Companies should not be allowed to trade, buy or sell personally identifiable information about consumers except to those parties where needed to complete a transaction(i.e. credit bureau, DMV, etc.) without their explicit permission. Any time a consumer wants to give that permission, it should be an opt-in only scheme and it should be illegal for companies to limit their services to those who choose to participate in such information sharing programs.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I disagree. Everything can be accessed once they have a shred of evidence to warrant access. This has been standard since long before anything as silly as the patriot act. It's the whole point of a warrant, really.
Without evidence, I can hardly agree that anyone should ever have unblocked access to my privacy, or yours. I'm amazed that my military, which I served in, is not fighting people who break my constitutional rights.
I agree with you about companies. The problem is that our country permits companies to do almost anything they want in agreements with customers and they give the customers the consumer power. Sadly, we're all a bit too ignorant or careless to ignore the companies that abuse us. I wonder if that has anything to do with the oligo-glomerate associations that direct media/information and politics?
The fact that the media knows exactly who signs their paychecks certainly doesn't help; but I suspect that there are more fundamental problems.
Up until fairly recently, the scope and utility of "indirect" surveillance methods has been extremely limited by hard technological constraints. The available direct methods were either highly invasive(having thugs ransack your house, looking for incriminating evidence, is hard to ignore), highly symmetric(the classic "small town where everybody knows everybody and somebody is always looking through their blinds" scenario), highly expensive(pretty much anything that involves sending out field agents and collecting big filing cabinets full of paper), or some combination.
Sheer cost presents one valuable passive defence against surveillance. Even if the state has unlimited legal power, their supply of jackbooted enforcers is finite, which places a hard cut-off on the set of people worth spying on. Invasiveness doesn't create hard cut-offs; but means that the state must either confine its surveillance to unpopular people, or pay a public relations/popular discontent cost every time it hits a sympathetic target. Symmetry is not a limit to surveillance per se(in fact, traditional societies with high levels of surveillance symmetry are often virtually transparent); but it effectively retards the development of opaque concentrations of surveillance power.
Contemporary technology has substantially relaxed all these restraints. Having your data silently copied and collated somewhere out in the aether of the complex modern economy is virtually invisible. No muss, no fuss, no doors battered down, no raids to upset the neighbours. It is also highly asymmetric. Only the most dedicated privacy wonks even know who knows about them, much less knows anything useful about those entities. This is, in part, because those entities take pains to hide("national security letters" vs. ordinary warrants, national security classifications, opaque corporations that, at most, are obliged to provide certain financial data, if publicly traded) ; but also because of the sheer complexity of modern civilization and life. If you live in a small town, knowing all possible surveillance entities requires basic social skills. In modern society, you basically need to be, or have access to, an investigative reporter, a lawyer, an accountant, a techie, and a fair surveillance expert yourself just to keep up. The final issue is cost. Two things have changed here. One is that the contemporary developed world is really fucking rich by the standards of any point in human history(at least until the fossil fuels give out). We can simply afford to spend far more on things that don't put food on the table without driving the population into the depths of squalor that provoke revolutions. The other is a little more subtle: a lot of modern surveillance data is "free" or cheap because its creation is subsidized by some other purpose. For example, the need to connect(and bill for) your cellphone calls is what finances the collection of substantial amounts of handset location, call record, and financial data. Transferring those data to the Feds is just a small additional cost. Advertising and marketing firms are perhaps even more dangerous in that regard. Once data concerning consumers becomes a commodity, the free market efficiently goes about collecting it. The Feds spend a great deal of money on surveillance, it is true; but these private sector processes are a potent multiplier of the bang they get for their buck.
This is why I am extremely pessimistic about the fate of privacy. Even if the political climate for privacy were better(and, frankly, it fucking sucks right now), we would still be crafting regulation against the tide of private sector incentives for surveillance. As any number of examples show, regulating against business incentives is hard. Further, because so much of modern surveillance is silent, and seemingly unobtrusive, it incurs a much smaller politic
Here in the USA most of us have been duped into thinking that the Government and Large corporations are at odds with each other. Instead of realizing that each represent a consolidation of power, and pose similar threats (and more often than not work together). We spend so much time divided and arguing about who represents "evil" ( the Govt or the Corporations) that they both pretty much get to do whatever the hell they want.
Corporations As Persons:
What you have to realize within these illegal transactions - bypassing the Constitution - is that you are dealing with immortals [insert vampire analogy] - these companies have that supreme advantage over all of us, putting us in a lesser category, of well, serf, basically.
Once you understand this you know where you really stand and why this "person-hood for corporations" must come to an end. Within this "law" companies are representing us [de facto] which is rediculous.
~hylas