Tag: data collection

The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker

Today, the world’s economy no longer runs on oil, but data. Shortly after the advent of the microprocessor came the internet, unleashing an onslaught of data running on the coils of fiber optic cables beneath the oceans and satellites above the skies. While often posited as a liberator of humanity against the oppressors of nation-states that allows previously impossible interconnectivity and social organization between geographically separated cultures to circumnavigate the monopoly on violence of world governments, ironically, the internet itself was birthed out of the largest military empire of the modern world – the United States.

The ARPANET

Specifically, the internet began as ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1972 became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently housed within the Department of Defense. ARPA was created by President Eisenhower in 1958 within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in direct response to the U.S.’ greatest military rival, the USSR, successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit with data broadcasting technology. While historically considered the birth of the Space Race, in reality, the formation of ARPA began the now-decades-long militarization of data brokers, quickly leading to world-changing developments in global positioning systems (GPS), the personal computer, networks of computational information processing (“time-sharing”), primordial artificial intelligence, and weaponized autonomous drone technology.

In October 1962, the recently-formed ARPA appointed J.C.R. Licklider, a former MIT professor and vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman (known as BBN, currently owned by defense contractor Raytheon), to head their Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). At BBN, Licklider developed the earliest known ideas for a global computer network, publishing a series of memos in August 1962 that birthed his “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept. Six months after his appointment to ARPA, Licklider would distribute a memo to his IPTO colleagues – addressed to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”– describing a “time-sharing network of computers” – building off a similar exploration of communal, distributed computation by John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his 1954 paper “Parallel Control” commissioned by defense contractor RAND – which would build the foundational concepts for ARPANET, the first implementation of today’s Internet.

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Privacy in Pieces: States Scramble to Protect Data as Congress Dithers

As Congress struggles to catch up to the European Union’s comprehensive data privacy regulations, some US states have begun to forge their own robust legislation to increase user protection. But this system only protects the data of some Americans, leaving more than half the country without guaranteed data protection or privacy rights.

And it may take years before a national solution is created, if at all.

The EU took its first step towards providing sweeping privacy protection years ago, with the creation of the region’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR, which took effect in 2018 and gives individuals ownership over their personal information and the right to control who can use it, is often marked as the first major, multinational step towards comprehensive data protection and privacy.

Traditionally, the EU’s approach to data privacy stems from a human rights standpoint and has its roots in World War II, when the Nazi party collected personal data to commit numerous atrocities and, later, when the East German secret police, the Stasi, carried out invasive state surveillance.

After the war ended, the right to privacy was enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and later in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, becoming the ideological foundation on which data privacy laws have been built in the EU today.

Across the Atlantic, the US Constitution does not explicitly provide a right to privacy.

Rather than enacting a comprehensive federal law, the US federal government has taken a reactive approach, passing legislation only after issues arise in a few specific business sectors, which has resulted in a series of data protection laws addressing specific types of data. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) have protected medical and financial data respectively since the 1990s.

“The US is very much an innovation, capital-first society,” said Jodi Daniels, founder and CEO of privacy consultancy firm Red Clover Advisors. “And they do want to protect the people, but it has to all get balanced.”

But in recent years, some lawmakers have begun to push back against this system by introducing comprehensive data privacy bills, like the bipartisan American Privacy Rights Act (APRA).

Introduced in April by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), APRA is like GDPR in that it is not limited to specific business sectors and aims to minimize the amount and types of data companies can collect, give consumers control over their information, and allow them to opt out of targeted advertising.

While the legislation didn’t get very far, stalling in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, it’s the furthest any comprehensive privacy bill has gone in Congress yet. To become law, however, it would have to be reintroduced next year when Republicans control both chambers. 

Some lawmakers, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), contend that APRA is more concerned with “controlling the internet” than creating a balance between innovation and privacy protection, and argue that the current right to private action present in the act, which allows individuals to pursue legal action if their privacy is violated, will give overwhelming power to trial lawyers.

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Social Media Giants Collecting Massive Amounts of Data From Kids, Teens

Child welfare advocates renewed calls for U.S. lawmakers to pass a pair of controversial bills aimed at protecting youth from Big Tech’s “dangerous and unacceptable business practices” after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report on Sept. 19 detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms.

The FTC staff report — entitled “A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services” — “shows how the tech industry’s monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance, especially via social media and video streaming services, with inadequate guardrails to protect consumers.”

The agency staff examined the practices of Meta platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; YouTube; X, formerly known as Twitter; Snapchat; Reddit; Discord; Amazon, which owns the gaming site Twitch; and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.

“The report finds that these companies engaged in mass data collection of their users and — in some cases — nonusers,” Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in the paper.

“It reveals that many companies failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks. It sheds light on how companies used our personal data, from serving hypergranular targeted advertisements to powering algorithms that shape the content we see, often with the goal of keeping us hooked on using the service.”

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Red Alert! Virtually All Of Our Personal Information, Including Social Security Numbers, Has Been Stolen And Posted Online By Hackers

Most Americans don’t even realize that virtually all of their personal information has been stolen and posted online for free.  The personal records of 2.9 billion people were stolen from a major data broker known as National Public Data earlier this year, and this month almost of the information that was stolen was posted online for anyone to freely take.  We are talking about names, addresses, phone numbers, employment histories, birth dates and Social Security numbers.  This is one of the most egregious privacy violations in the history of the world, but hardly anyone knows what has happened.  So please share this article as widely as you possibly can.

USA Today is reporting that the original theft of this data occurred “in or around April 2024″…

An enormous amount of Social Security numbers and other sensitive information for millions of people could be in the hands of a hacking group after a data breach and may have been released on an online marketplace, The Los Angeles Times reported this week.

The hacking group USDoD claimed it had allegedly stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reported by Bloomberg Law. The breach was believed to have happened in or around April 2024, according to the lawsuit.

The company that this data was stolen from is a Florida-based background check company known as National Public Data.  The following is what Wikipedia has to say about this particular firm…

Jerico Pictures, Inc., doing business as National Public Data[1][2] is a data broker company that performs employee background checks. Their primary service is collecting information from public data sources, including criminal records, addresses, and employment history, and offering that information for sale.

Of course there are hordes of other data brokers out there these days.

They collect vast troves of information on as many people as they possibly can, and then they monetize that information in various ways.

Equifax, Epsilon and Acxiom are the three largest data brokers in existence today.  Each one of them brings in more than 2 billion dollars of revenue annually.

As you can see, collecting and selling our personal information is very big business.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues General Motors for Illegally Harvesting and Selling Drivers’ Private Data to Corporate Giants, Including Insurance Companies

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against General Motors (GM), alleging that the automotive giant engaged in deceptive and unlawful business practices by collecting and selling private driving data from over 1.5 million Texans without their knowledge or consent.

This lawsuit follows Paxton’s announcement in June 2024 that he had launched an investigation into several car manufacturers suspected of improperly harvesting vast amounts of data directly from vehicles.

The findings have been alarming, revealing a disturbing trend among companies leveraging invasive technologies to exploit unsuspecting consumers.

“Our investigation revealed that General Motors has engaged in egregious business practices that violated Texans’ privacy and broke the law. We will hold them accountable,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Companies are using invasive technology to violate the rights of our citizens in unthinkable ways.”

The crux of the lawsuit centers around GM’s use of technology installed in most vehicles manufactured since 2015. This technology allegedly collects, records, analyzes, and transmits detailed driving data every time a driver uses their vehicle, according to the press release.

Shockingly, GM sold this sensitive information to various third parties, including insurance companies, who used it to generate “Driving Scores” aimed at influencing insurance premiums.

“A customer’s Driving Score was based on a series of “factors” developed by General Motors that were supposedly indicative of “bad” driving behavior and included behavior such as (1) unique identifiers of a trip; (2) trip mileage; (3) hard braking and acceleration events; (4) speed events over 80 miles per hour; and (5) other behavior tracked by OnStar Vehicle Diagnostics (“OVD”). Under the Verisk Agreement, GM provided Verisk with the Driving Data necessary to determine whether a customer exhibited any “bad” driving behaviors,” according to the lawsuit.

This sensitive information includes location tracking, driving habits, personal communications within the vehicle’s system, customer ID, name, and home address.

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US government tanked the economy with covid lockdowns to gain control over the population through data collection and enforcement

The covid lockdowns amounted to the world’s largest and most elaborate economic head-fake in human history.

It left the entire world less free and less prosperous, and with drained hopes that restoring normality can happen anytime soon. To add injury to the insult, most official institutions are manufacturing fake data to cover it all up.

In the following, Jeffrey Tucker explains the economic impact on the USA of the lockdown in March 2020 and its aftermath. He highlights that the labour market has not fully recovered, stimulus was eroded by inflation, retail sales and factory orders have not significantly increased, and output has not seen a substantial rise. Additionally, it questions the accuracy of inflation data and the sustainability of the economic recovery.

Why did they shut economies down? A major ambition of the covid response was the creation of a universal vaccine passport, he writes. “All these efforts were reversed but the plan itself revealed the larger agenda: control through data collection and enforcement.  The ambition is not gone and will likely come back but a better and more comprehensive path is the Central Bank Digital Currency.”

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Oxford Nanopore: The Internet of Living Things is closer than you think

The Internet of Living Things (“IoLT”) is a concept that connects living organisms, such as humans, animals and plants, to the Internet, enabling the exchange of data and information. This concept is an extension of the Internet of Things (“IoT”), which focuses on connecting devices and objects.

In short, the IoLT enables real-time monitoring of biological functions, such as vital signs, genetic data and environmental factors.  The collected data is analysed to provide insights into the biological state of the organism, enabling early detection of diseases and personalised healthcare. The data is transmitted to the cloud, where it can be accessed and analysed by healthcare professionals, researchers and other people. The biological state of an organism becomes an extension of the internet, enabling the creation of new intelligence about natural systems.

Examples of how the IoLT will collect data are:

  • Wearable sensors, such as fitness trackers, which can monitor vital signs and transmit data to the cloud for analysis.
  • Smart contact lenses, contact lenses with embedded sensors that can monitor glucose levels and transmit data to the cloud for diabetes management.
  • Portable genomic sequencers, portable devices that can sequence DNA and transmit data to the cloud for genetic analysis.
  • Internet-enabled biocyber interfaces, biocyber interfaces which can connect living insects to the internet, enabling control of their behaviour and communication with the environment.

The topic of this article is portable genomic sequencers; in particular Oxford Nanopore Technology devices.

In 2015, 9 years ago, when Clive Brown, Chief Technology Officer of Oxford Nanopore Technology was asked what the likelihood was of portable DNA sequencers becoming reality, he answered: “It is already a reality. The technology is now in the optimisation phase and will only get better. If you are asking how long before it reaches a clinic – then I think that is a different question, but it will be in many other non-clinical environments first.”

The DNA sequencer he was referring to was Oxford Nanopore’s MinION.  Any living thing, or system of living things, can be connected to the internet via the MinION or by any similar real-time DNA sensing devices, Brown said.

“Healthcare is just one application [ ]; equally, water sources, food supplies, hospital air and many other systems can be frequently sampled and sequenced – also allowing their state to be trended, tracked and predicted,” Brown said.

A few years later, in 2019, an article published by International Defence, Security and Technology (“IDST”) described MinION as small as a USB stick and easy to use. “Oxford Nanopore has designed an intelligent cloud lab, Metrichor, to be used for genomics data storage in conjunction with smartphone apps that interpret the meaning of DNA sequences. Researchers around the world now use pocket-size genomic sequencers to rapidly detect resistant pathogenic strains in hospitals, and diagnose infectious agents in food supply and aboard spaceships,” IDST wrote.

In early 2020, Oxford Nanopore’s technology was put to use in the surveillance of the coronavirus outbreak. 

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CIA Targeting Smartphone App Data

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, who oversees 18 separate agencies comprising the wider “intelligence community” – including the CIA, FBI, and NSA – has released a “policy framework for commercially available information.” It is not only the very first public confirmation by a US government official that Stateside spying entities acquire extensive data on private citizens from third party brokers, but admission this yield is deeply sensitive. While purportedly setting limits on the use of this information by spooks, the details are vague or non-existent.

“Commercially available information” (CAI) refers to data collected on individuals, typically by their smartphones, and the apps they use, sold by third parties. Via various sleights of hand and ruthless exploitation of regulatory loopholes, US intelligence obtained information not accessible by average citizens, which would typically require a court-approved search warrant to access. Yet, by purchasing this data from private brokers, spying agencies can still claim this snooping is “open source”, based on “publicly available” records.

A particularly rich source of CAI is data hoovered from digital advertising. In-app and website adspace is sold on real-time bidding (RTB) exchanges, and location and other user data is often included as a bonus, to ensure optimal ad targeting. Many data brokers pose as advertisers in order to “scrape” the listings for user information, before selling it on for profit. The value of this data, and the malign purposes to which it can be put, are vast.

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Visa Rolls Out Tech To Share More Data on Customers’ Shopping History With Retailers

Visa, one of the world’s two largest payment card services, is launching new, proprietary technology that will allow it to give retailers even more data collected from its customers.

The move is seen as Visa working hard to keep up competing with the other giant – Mastercard – but also, fintech firms like Plaid.

The latter’s business, in terms of Visa considering it a rival, is revealing: it’s to power fintech and associated products with a data transfer network – specifically, a platform that “enables applications to connect with [a] user’s bank account.”

Visa’s “fear of missing out” on another lucrative personal data and customer behavior-based money grab is taking the form of “tokens” which allow banks and merchants to communicate so that banks can share customer data that offers insight into their preferences based on past transactions.

Reports say that this requires customers’ consent – but then also quote Visa Chief Executive Officer Ryan McInerney as saying, “It’s almost entirely blind to almost all consumers. They just know their payments work better.”

McInerney came up with a brand new way to phrase “opt-out” – he said the tokens come with consent “as the foundational premise.” The visa exec brazenly referred to this as “putting [the] customer in control”:

“Consumers will have the option, through their bank app, to revoke access to their information.”

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Here’s How the CIA Plans To Use Your Ad Tracking Data

For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they’re leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information.” Her office oversees 18 agencies in the “intelligence community,” including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.

In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.

Haines’ new framework claims that “additional clarity” on the government’s policies will help protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with “safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information” and write an annual report on how they use this data.

As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn’t require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policies.

“The framework’s absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans,” Wyden tells Reason. “The DNI’s framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen.”

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