The U.S. intelligence community is reviewing how it gathers vast troves of Americans’ personal information from businesses that harvest people’s data from phones, cars, and internet-connected devices.
The intimate data available on the open market means the government needs to rethink how it acquires commercially available information (CAI), according to a new report from a panel established by the Director of National Intelligence.
“In a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI 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 panel’s report said. “The IC therefore needs to develop more refined approaches to CAI.”
The panel’s report detailed some private-sector contracts used by the government to access people’s data. For example, the report said the FBI contracted with the company ZeroFox for “social media alerting,” while the Navy used Sayari Analytics for access to a database with information on “U.S. sanctioned actors.”
“The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits,” the panel’s report said. “Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation. While the IC cannot willingly blind itself to this information, it must appreciate how unfettered access to CAI increases its power in ways that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other societal expectations.”
The panel’s report is dated January 2022 and said it was approved for release this month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said this week she established the panel to make recommendations which the intelligence community is taking under consideration and working to implement.
“Once we finalize our framework for dealing with such information based on the panel’s recommendations, we will make as much of it publicly available as possible,” Ms. Haines said in a statement. “I remain committed to sharing as much as possible about the IC’s activities with the American people.”
Ms. Haines said she agreed to release the panel’s report to the public in response to a request from Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat.
Mr. Wyden said he appreciated that Ms. Haines kept her word to make the panel’s findings public, but the report demonstrated the government’s policies “failed to provide essential safeguards for Americans’ privacy.”
“The executive branch must exercise much stronger oversight of this practice, issue guidance to agencies about the legal status of commercial data, and provide transparency to the American people about how it interprets the law,” Mr. Wyden said in a statement. “If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance.”
Mr. Wyden said Congress also needs to pass new legislation to tackle the government’s purchase of data, companies’ collection and sale of data and to keep the information away from foreign adversaries.
Mr. Wyden partnered with five other senators and two representatives to introduce legislation this week aiming to stymie foreign adversaries from exploiting U.S. data. The bipartisan cadre of lawmakers expressed concern about how Americans’ TikTok data may be used by China, and want the Commerce Department to help define restrictions on the export of data to various countries.
Source:Washington Times
