Data analytics companies collect & sell 75k personal details on every American consumer
A new Senate report has found that commercial data brokers are collecting up to 75,000 data points on each consumer they track in the United States. This information can include simple preferences, such as your favorite sports, but can also involve facts about your health and lifestyle – all of which are being sold to other companies for profit.
In January, President Obama mentioned the importance of safeguarding citizens’ information, saying that privacy advocates need to be concerned with data collection by private companies, not just the government.
“The challenges to our privacy do not come from government alone,” Obama said in January. “Corporations of all shapes and sizes track what you buy, store and analyze our data and use it for commercial purposes.”
Despite the president’s statements – and his previous push for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights – the administration has done little to introduce proposals for Congress, while lawmakers themselves have also largely stayed on the sidelines. Generally speaking, Republicans have come out against any regulations on private businesses, while Democrats have steered clear of the issue in order to avoid conflicts with tech industry donors.
One exception has been Senate Commerce Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who told Politico that Americans should be just as focused on private data collection as they are on the NSA. He has proposed a bill that would limit data brokers, but did not seem particularly optimistic about its chances.
“Once we decided we’re going with the Internet, we gave up our privacy,” he told the outlet. “It’s always the double side: It’s the greatest discovery ever made and also one of the worst things that ever happened.”
Here are a few ways the Obama Administration is spying on YOU:
The DOJ is still trying to hide the fact it lied to the supreme court about domestic surveillance.
The DOJ insists that Section 702 allowed for the collection of purely domestic communications without a warrant if they were merely "about" a target (rather than to or from that target) was really no big deal at all and not relevant to the case.
Your letter raises questions regarding the now-declassified "about" collections that have resulted in the acquisition of some wholly domestic communications as a result of Section 702 surveillance and whether the government's representations in Clapper v. Amnesty International were incomplete or misleading for failing to refer to such collections. The government acted appropriately by not addressing the "about" collections in Clapper v. Amnesty International because the existence of this type of collection was classified throughout the period during which the case was briefed, argued, and decided, and because those collections did not bear upon on the legal issues in the case. At all times, the Department and the Office of the Solicitor General have a duty of candor in our representations to the Supreme Court, and it is a duty we take extremely seriously. The Department and the Office of the Solicitor General also have a duty to respect the classified status of information, and that is also a duty we take extremely seriously. In litigation, we must take pains to avoid discussing matters that are unnecessary to the resolution of matters before the Court when those matters might disclose classified information or undermine national security, while ensuring that the Court has all of the information relevant to deciding the issues before it.
The Department's briefing and argument in Clapper v. Amnesty International fully respected both of these duties. The Department described the surveillance authorized by Section 702 (and the provision's targeting and minimization requirements) accurately, and we made no statements that could be reasonably understood as denying the existence of "about" collection. Moreover, the possibility of then-classified, incidental collection of domestic communications, while of undoubted importance and interest to the public, was not material to the legal issue before the Supreme Court.
Click here to read more about the DOJ lying to justify illegal spying.
The FBI & the NSA think using 'PRISM' to spy on Americans "Is a team sport"
The FBI has nearly unrestricted access to the NSA's PRISM system, which harvests huge quantities of private content from internet communications providers like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo. As the NSA says, "PRISM is a team sport!"
Click here to view the document.
The FBI is building a huge facial recognition database — which will also include palm prints and iris scans — to augment its fingerprint collection. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports it will hold as many as 52 million facial images by the end of next year, including pictures of people who have never been arrested.
The Treasury Department has launched a program to scan several government databases — and, in the future, perhaps commercial databases as well — for information about individuals due to receive federal payments. The aim: To identify anyone who might be ineligible to receive the payment, or might be suspected of committing fraud, before the check goes in the mail.
The Defense Department is considering mining commercial databases as well, to scan for worrisome information about employees and contractors who hold classified clearance. Most are officially vetted only every five to 10 years; the Pentagon is eager for more frequent checks that could disclose drug arrests, domestic violence charges, financial troubles or other red flags.
The Education Department has also been a major proponent of big data. It has used policy and financial incentives, including more than $500 million in direct grants, to prod states to build longitudinal databases that will track students’ progress from pre-K through high school and in some cases, into college and the workforce. States will mine the data to spot patterns; they might, for instance, be able to identify behaviors in 6-year-olds that indicate the child has an elevated risk of dropping out of high school a decade later.
The department has also relaxed privacy rules to make it easier for school districts to share student records with state and federal officials, as well as with private companies, without parental consent. Privacy advocates sued to block some of those changes, but lost in court.
Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union raised questions about the devices’ ultimate purpose.
“Are they going to be little snitches in our pockets, or are they going to be under our control and serving us?” he asked.
I think we all know the answer, our politicians & police have sold us out!http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/feds-big-data-106650.html?hp=l10
The laughable title of the new report is "Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values"
Click here to read the report.
Our children are being spied on in schools across America:
The NSA has nothing on the education tech startup known as Knewton.
The Knewton data analytics firm has peered into the brains of more than 4 million students across the country. By monitoring every mouse click, every keystroke, every split-second hesitation as children work through digital textbooks, Knewton is able to find out not just what individual kids know, but how they think. It can tell who has trouble focusing on science before lunch — and who will struggle with fractions next Thursday.
The amount of data being collected is staggering. Ed tech companies of all sizes, from basement startups to global conglomerates, have jumped into the game. The most adept are scooping up as many as 10 million unique data points on each child, each day. That’s orders of magnitude more data than Netflix or Facebook or even Google collect on their users.
Students are tracked as they play online games, watch videos, read books, take quizzes and run laps in physical education. The monitoring continues as they work on assignments from home, with companies logging children’s locations, homework schedules, Web browsing habits and, of course, their academic progress.
A report by McKinsey & Co. last year found that expanding the use of data in K-12 schools and colleges could drive at least $300 billion a year in added economic growth in the U.S. by improving instruction and making education more efficient.
A recent national study found that just 7 percent of the contracts between districts and tech companies handling student data barred the companies from selling it for profit.
Few contracts required the companies to delete sensitive data when they were done with it. And just one in four clearly explained why the company needed personal student information in the first place, according to the study, conducted by the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University.
“We don’t know what these companies are doing with our children’s data,” said Joel Reidenberg, the Fordham law professor who conducted the study.
A White House report on big data released earlier this month recognized the risk, and called for updating FERPA. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on Wednesday began circulating a draft bill to do just that. Their bill would tighten controls on student records and give parents the right to review — and correct — some of the information that private companies hold on their children. But the bill only covers official student educational records, not the streams of “metadata” that companies collect when kids work online.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/data-mining-your-children-106676.html?hp=f1
Spying on Americans is meant to crush citizens’ dissent, not catch terrorists:
In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes:
The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.
The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.
The FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was first exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.
Files related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups. The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.
Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded: “[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilate operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”
These incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“. The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”. The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.
The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.
One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.
The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.
Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.
The NSA’s treatment of Anonymous, as well as the vague category of people known as “hacktivists”, is especially troubling and extreme. That’s because Anonymous is not actually a structured group but a loosely organised affiliation of people around an idea: someone becomes affiliated with Anonymous by virtue of the positions they hold. Worse still, the category “hacktivists” has no fixed meaning: it can mean the use of programming skills to undermine the security and functioning of the internetbut can also refer to anyone who uses online tools to promote political ideals. That the NSA targets such broad categories of people is tantamount to allowing it to spy on anyone anywhere, including in the US, whose ideas the government finds threatening.
Greenwald told Democracy Now:
People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, “threats.” That’s the nature of power, is to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/spying-meant-crush-dissent-terrorism.html
