U.S. Military monitors cellphones with no warrant.

[Pauls' Revere]

And all we hear from the ACLU is crickets.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/militar...nt-11611350374

WASHINGTON—In a new document made public Friday, the nation’s top military intelligence agency acknowledged monitoring the location of U.S.-based mobile devices without a warrant through location data drawn from ordinary smartphone apps.

The Defense Intelligence Agency told congressional investigators that the agency has access to “commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones” from both the U.S. and abroad. It said it had queried its database to look at the location information of U.S.-based smartphones five times in the last 2½ years as part of authorized investigations.

Such data is typically drawn from smartphone apps such as weather, games and other apps that get user permission to access a phone’s GPS location. A robust commercial market exists for such data for advertising and other commercial purposes. The Wall Street Journal first revealed last year that numerous U.S. government agencies were also buying access to that data from commercial brokers without a warrant, raising questions about whether those agencies were adequately safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

[jmdrake]

And all we hear from the ACLU is crickets.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/militar...nt-11611350374

WASHINGTON—In a new document made public Friday, the nation’s top military intelligence agency acknowledged monitoring the location of U.S.-based mobile devices without a warrant through location data drawn from ordinary smartphone apps.

The Defense Intelligence Agency told congressional investigators that the agency has access to “commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones” from both the U.S. and abroad. It said it had queried its database to look at the location information of U.S.-based smartphones five times in the last 2½ years as part of authorized investigations.

Such data is typically drawn from smartphone apps such as weather, games and other apps that get user permission to access a phone’s GPS location. A robust commercial market exists for such data for advertising and other commercial purposes. The Wall Street Journal first revealed last year that numerous U.S. government agencies were also buying access to that data from commercial brokers without a warrant, raising questions about whether those agencies were adequately safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

Actually the ACLU has been talking about the threat coming from big data for some time now.



As for needing a warrant? Well....technically it's not needed from what you've described. If your data is already publicly available, the government doesn't need a warrant to get it. Case in point, the government can't force you to give a DNA sample without a warrant, but if a government agent sees you spit your gum into the trash he can dumpster dive and get it without a warrant. (I know of a case where that happened).

What needs to change? I hate to say it, but this is a case where more regulation is needed. Thanks to HIPPA, your healthcare provider isn't allowed to sell a database with "user identifiable information" in it. Technology companies should not be able to sell user identifiable location information either. Just because I want to know what the weather is where I live or I want turn by turn directions to a particular location doesn't mean that I should have to allow that information to be sold. It's not just the government that should not be able to buy that. Say private investigators started selling "enhanced background checks" where individuals could buy a map of where I had been for the past week or month or year? Why should that be okay just because the entity buying the information isn't the government? Imagine a stalker buying that information?

Of course that begs the question if the information the DIA is buying is "user identifiable." If all they are able to find out is "There are a lot of people that congregate downtown between these hours on these particular days of the week" I'm not bothered by that.

[kahless]

This thing about people thinking that they need warrants is a sham. TV show propaganda has conditioned people for years that there is a process. Total and absolute sham.

If any local, county, state or federal agency or just some rogue in any of those groups wants your info they simply do it with a few keystrokes. There are no checks and balances, (in some cases only after the fact and traced to whom?). EFF has warned about this for years but no one gives a $#@! since the TV has people believing that it is some how hard for agencies to do this and there is a "process".

[oyarde]

But whose phones did they monitor ? If they were service members that is different than civilians I think .

[Pauls' Revere]

Such data is typically drawn from smartphone apps such as weather, games and other apps that get user permission to access a phone’s GPS location. A robust commercial market exists for such data for advertising and other commercial purposes. The Wall Street Journal first revealed last year that numerous U.S. government agencies were also buying access to that data from commercial brokers without a warrant, raising questions about whether those agencies were adequately safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

The ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to access data on Americans for intelligence purposes is typically circumscribed. A warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is required for most kinds of surveillance. However, the Defense Intelligence Agency told Congress that it didn’t believe it needed any sort of court authorization to acquire commercial data for foreign intelligence or national security purposes.

Believe all you want, what does the court say?

That echoes a position taken by numerous other U.S. government agencies in recent years as the amount of data on individuals using computers, smartphones and tablets has exploded. The Department of Homeland Security is buying a similar data product and is using it for warrantless tracking as part of its border security and immigration mission. The Internal Revenue Service also purchased access to cellphone data as part of its law enforcement mission. All claim because the data is purchased on the open market, no court order is required.

The disclosure about the DIA’s domestic monitoring efforts was made in a memo to the office of Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been conducting an investigation into the use of commercially available data by government agencies for intelligence and law enforcement purposes. The New York Times first reported the existence of the memo.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

Mr. Wyden raised the issue of the government’s commercial data acquisition this month in a hearing to consider the nomination of Avril Haines, President Biden’s nominee for director of national intelligence.

“The abuses here take your breath away, and it really is a dodge on all the legal protections Americans have,” Mr. Wyden said about U.S. efforts to collect data.

“I’m particularly troubled by the intelligence community’s purchases of Americans’ private data. It’s almost like getting around the whole question of people’s privacy rights. And so transparency is crucial,” Mr. Wyden said.

[Anti Globalist]

As if the military really cares about warrants.