A recently declassified report detailed how US government agencies have been amassing citizens’ private data with virtually no oversight, due to the data’s classification as “publicly available.”
The report, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ONI), exposes the size and scope of the American government’s effort to gather data on its own citizens through the purchase of commercially available information. In late 2021, director of national intelligence Avril Haines tasked her advisers with investigating secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and U.S. intelligence community members. Their finalized report came to her desk in January of 2022, but wasn’t declassified and released to the public until last Friday.
The report addressed how the U.S. Intelligence Community has been taking advantage of a lack of oversight on privacy in the digital age in order to accrue mass access to Americans’ private information, reaffirming concerns about government overreach in citizens’ private lives.
The report noted that commercially available information “is treated as a subset of publicly available information,” because it’s available for the public to purchase and is therefore “less strictly regulated than other forms of information acquired by the (Intelligence Community).” Thus, government and intelligence agencies have access to citizens’ private information without a warrant, but technically aren’t violating citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights.
The report also stated that commercially available information has undergone significant changes, now providing more “sensitive and intimate” details than ever before. The authors of the report argued that these changes contradict the rationale of “treating (publicly available information) categorically as non-sensitive information, that the (Intelligence Community) can use without significantly affecting the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons.” They asserted that changes must be made to the practices and policies of government agencies in order to be able to protect Americans’ privacy in accordance with the Fourth Amendment.
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“(Publicly available information) is no longer a good proxy for non-sensitive information. Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, (commercially available information) includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained, if at all, only through targeted (and predicated) collection, and that could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety,” the report read.
The authors of the report observed that the “single most important point” of their findings was that the intelligence community “needs to develop more refined policies to govern (the) acquisition and treatment” of commercially available information.
The report noted ways in which this information could be used against Americans if it falls into the wrong hands — scenarios which, Dell Cameron pointed out in an article by Wired, “have been committed by intelligence agencies and White House administrations in the past” and have directly lead to the constraints on domestic surveillance activities that do exist.
“This report reveals what we feared most,” Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at Demand Progress, said in the article. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”
“I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” Ron Wyden, a US senator for Oregon, told Wired.
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