Destroying confidentiality of data on the net is a greater cost than getting small time tax evaders. The brunt of tax evasion is legal and fully a legislative issue.
I used to be a big EFF supporter until I learned they take millions in donations from the same organizations they’re supposed to be watching. Best case scenario it’s a massive conflict of interest, it’s a big problem for me that they find it to be ok.
This is an irresponsible claim if not backed up with a citation.
Further, I happen to monitor corporate funding to nonprofits (including the EFF) and public reporting suggests EFF only received $7500 from Google in 2018 and $25K from Facebook.
Whereas Center for Democracy and Technology, which was founded by the former Executive Director of the EFF in 1994, received $430K and $500K, respectively.
We need a Supreme Court ruling or law that says if the government doesn’t have a warrant to collect your data, they also can’t buy it from third parties.
We also need privacy protections so these companies wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Not a Supreme Court ruling: if there's no law outlawing it, there's no basis for them to rule against it. Do you really want five unelected, unaccountable lawyers deciding this matter?
"Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The judiciary doesn't just rule on the constitutionality of laws (actions by the legislature) but also actions by the executive, for example vaccine mandates.
We can't rely on SCOTUS to make this ruling for another 50+ years, so our best hope is to start with state legislators. The majority of law enforcement happens at a state level, and most state legislators aren't as hamstrung as the federal one is, so this is the easiest way to achieve the most impactful results.
Also, POTUS is in charge of most federal law enforcement agencies. So it might be possible to handle this at a federal level through an executive order. Obviously, this doesn't have the staying power of a proper law, but it's something.
We just need members of Congress to have embarrassing info or evidence of criminality exposed by data broker collection. Then they'll seal everything up like with video rental records.
Feels like it would be more airtight to amend the Constitution. Why hope that precedence falls a certain way instead of removing any ambiguity from the law?
Third party doctrine has been decided on a case by case basis with respect to the type of data provided. Recently the SCOTUS has been pushing back on this, in particularly around automatic data sharing intrinsic to the operation of a device, such as cell phone location records.
However, no one has gone as far as Utah in requiring warrants.
If I hire a hitman who murders you, I will be guilty of first-degree murder. Our legal doctrine is sophisticated enough to handle this kind of first-order misdirection.
If SCOTUS outlawed buying the data, they’d just find ways around that too. Maybe they’d just start creating apps and directly monitoring people. With an unlimited marketing and development budget, they could wind up on the majority of Americans’ phones pretty fast. Depending on the kinds of apps they created, they might get warrantless access to millions of bank accounts, text messages, emails, video conferences, full real-time location tracking, and more.
Startup idea: Buy dirt on your enemies and donate it to the treasury - with just a press of a button! Now they aren't buying it anymore so all should be well.
You'd get industry screaming bloody murder faster than you can say 'Uncle Sam'. See why the NWS/NOAA are restricted in the weather products they can offer, and why a simplified tax filing option has been so long in coming.
Warrantless access to all of those things is basically the definition of an unreasonable search and seizure. It is prima facie prohibited by the 4th amendment. There is no "way around" it.
Why? I understand the subject is unpleasant but I don't see anything that remotely qualifies as legal over reach.
Users must sign a consent statement to a terms of services agreement. That is a voluntary action where users erode their own privacy protections and surrender their contributions. Anything that happens later is completely incidental and solely between the data owner (which is not the user) and the third party.
Irrelevant to the 4th amendment. A service's TOS does not absolve the government of its constitutional prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. Buying data from a 3rd party service is still a search and seizure, much like paying a hitman is still first-degree murder. The question is whether it is reasonable.
The Third-Party Doctrine is about the ability to compel third parties to turn over information they hold on others. They don't need to resort to that when they can just buy the data on the open market.
>> Unlike private actors, governmental actors are publicly constrained in their actions and representatives of the will of our society.
Are you aware of the term 'unelected bureaucrat', and do you know how many of them exist? They are accountable to no one. They continually prove to be significant problems.
My major concern with this is the accuracy of the information. I regularly put in dodgy data on registration forms where there is no financial contract. This puts me at risk of being held to that information. Because it's on the computer, it must be right.
But why? I would like to be able to text my wife while she’s at work. Shouldn’t I be free to do that without sacrificing my right to privacy? Or should we just keep technology the same as it was in the 18th century?
Unfortunately, this isn't really the Fed's buying their way around the 4th amendment as the article states: it's people selling away their 4th amendment rights by giving their personal data & right to resell it to companies that will sell to anyone with the cash to buy it.
As I understand it, that's not quite true. I can't get a phone provider that won't pen register my data off. It's not an option and it's entirely not practical to conduct life without a phone of some kind.
People say they want privacy, but people say a lot of things they don't mean. Instead I look at their actions. No one's willing to inconvenience themselves even slightly for privacy.
It is true when you're trying to mix pen register data into this. That is a completely different class of data that no law enforcement agency has to pay for or contract with an outside company to access, mixing apples & oranges from what the Treasury is purchasing.
The context of this story is data willingly given up by users through apps or websites that people give permission to use & resell. A decade ago or more there may have been more of an excuse for consumers: awareness of just what was tracked and how it was repackaged and sold on to other entities was not as well known. Now there is little excuse: If someone installs an app and hits "agree" to the data it wants to access, or clicks "okay" to the browser popups on sites that want their location, that's on them.
Data legally (if dubiously) collected explicitly for law enforcement purposes that still require a court order to access is a completely separate issue in terms of giving up 4th amendment rights.
Telco data is actually specifically protected specifically for this reason. It’s immune from third party doctrine, which is the whole, “the govt can ask someone else who has your data for it.”
Not sure how that exception is being handled in the Treasury case.
I didn't give anyone shit. Don't accuse me (or anyone else) of that. This is advertising tracking data that normal people can't avoid generating. Ever had a product advertisement follow you around the web? That's the kind of data we're talking about here. I aggressively block, limit and quash everything like this (to the point of things often not working on my networks and devices) and I still generate massive amounts of data that I would prefer not be used to target me for anything. Blaming the user for this arguably illegal abuse of their data is irresponsible and borders on malicious blame shifting.
You're point would have been better made without the confrontational tone and upfront profanity.
The article specifically talks about apps as well, and that is a user choice. Web pages also ask for location data in popups: this can be denied to them, which limits (though only limit, not prevent) pinpoint location tracking. I never said all tracking can be prevented. I said that people give away their personal data. That is a true statement regardless of whether certain types of data are taken without their consent.
I think we're probably (mostly, or at least partly) on the same page here. But if you want to continue a discussion that's fine, but only if you review HN community guidelines on discourse and civility beforehand. Also not that I often go days without revisiting threads to see if further conversation on a topic would interest me, but I'll try to make a trip back to this one to check in.
I don't think much of the constitution but surely this goes against the spirit of the 4th amendment. It kind of defeats the whole purpose. The sale seems to be conducted under duress. Also, the way you frame it sounds wrong. You wouldn't expect it to be legally binding for someone to sell his constitutional right not to be made a slave, for (an extreme) example.
The easy way out would be to make such information not suitable as evidence. Perhaps exceptions will be made for cases when there's a clear risk to public safety. (such as prosecuting al capone)
People do have, in certain situations, the ability to sell their constitutional rights. You sell your right to free speech when you sign an NDA. You can't sell yourself into slavery because slavery itself is illegal.
Slavery itself is also somewhat of a special case because entering into a contract requires the ability for each party to seek redress or other appropriate methods of enforcement. But once a slave, all personal agency is lost and therefore the enslaved party is no longer on equal grounds with respect to having the contract honored. It is an inherently paradoxical contract.
Contrast this with selling your right to free speech with an NDA: you still have access to all the methods of enforcement and redress if disagreements about the terms arise while the contract is in effect.
I'd recommend doing some reading on constitutional law and specifically interpretations of the 4th amendment. One cannot "sell" their 4th amendment right, because the text of the amendment places obligations on the government. The act of buying 3rd party data is tantamount to a search and seizure, regardless of whatever TOS was signed by the user who provided that data.
> The act of buying 3rd party data is tantamount to a search and seizure, regardless of whatever TOS was signed by the user who provided that data.
Legally, this is false, but obviously most people here would advocate for data ownership and control, even when it's transferred under a contract (regardless if it's via a checkbox, or signed and notarized).
When I said Feds I meant it as the federal government in general, not a reference to The (Fed)eral Reserve. Because I'm guessing that if Treasury can do this, it's also an option available to any investigative branch of the federal government.
A good start, but their profiles are probably incredibly well scrubbed (or whatever is out there is already mitigated).
Instead, collect it on every Congressperson and then see how fast things change. Most politicians don't have the means to scrub their backgrounds like multi-million dollar PR-vulnerable CEOs.
If one sees the U.S. constitution and its amendments merely as dated conventions, there is no reason for the IRS and other agencies not to leverage tech to drive enforcement numbers, and for the agencies themselves to just become the policy levers they want to have. However, there are others who believe the rules are in place to prevent this precise type of eventuality, where a technological change shifts the balance of power and shreds any perception of a social contract, so you need rules that limit the scope and powers of government so it doesn't consume and enslave everything.
I think a generation of people who believe the former statement have taken control of institutions, and we're watching it play out now. If you want to predict what this generation of bureaucracy will do, find the emergency exceptions and notwithstanding discretion to every law that protects the individual and limits the power of government, and then contrive the excuse that enables it, and this will be the policy and tactics of the people behind it. This Treasury collecting data story isn't about legalisms and principles, the people doing it really are nihilists, where language itself is just words that can mean anything, so it might as well mean whatever they want. Arguing under the false belief that principles and logic matters means doing nothing while they ratchet up controls and make themselves impossible to dislodge.
You aren't going to persuade the Treasury or other people involved in these plays with reason, as the prospect of total, permanent, tech-facilitated dominion means the stakes are too high for them not to make a play for it. Only the courts, or sadly, conflict can dislodge it I think. We need to seriously consider how much tech is causing our governments to metastasize, and what the options for mitigating it are.
There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people in government without accountability as leverage against you personally. This was paranoid ranting 20 years ago, and today it's just unpopular buzzkill. All that's left is to say "it was ever thus" and the only people who complained were the ones merely maladapted to the change and the inevitable progress of history.
> There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people in government without accountability as leverage against you personally.
I have one small revision: There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people without accountability as leverage against you personally.
The difference is that the government is, in some sense, unaccountable by fiat. At least with private actors we can have the possibility of accountability through legal recourse.
"I think a generation of people who believe the former statement have taken control of institutions"
I think the cause and effect are backwards here. It is their having taken control of institutions that makes individuals less likely to take seriously the spirit of pesky constitutional protections. Which was of course foreseen by the founding fathers.
It seems apparent that the US government is pursuing a novel strategy to route around the Bill of Rights:
Steps:
* Allow (and encourage) private sector monopolies to form
* Use its leverage and influence to "encourage" those monopolies to do things which the US government is not allowed to do (examples: censorship, data collection)
The list of First Amendment precedents, for example, with respect to the government is long and detailed. On the other hand, private companies operate under fewer restrictions and can act much more freely.
So if we have a situation where there are a small number of monopolies and they, through personal relationships (marriage), lobbying, and the revolving door have a cozy relationship with the US government, then the government can effectively censor (for example) by more or less declaring "will no one rid me of these turbulent tweets" and have the monopolies jump to comply (or face increased risk of antitrust action for example).
This is a win-win for both: the monopolies avoid antitrust and other unwanted regulation by playing ball, and the government gets to ignore the Bill of Rights by "outsourcing" actions to what are in effect de facto quasi-governmental entities. It's only a loss for the people for whom the Bill of Rights was written to protect.
Kind of reminds me of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The discretionary federal budget averages like 8% of the economy--that is an ungodly amount of economic resources that can be directed to private entities to accomplish basically anything the government wants to do, regardless of what the Constitution dictates.
a) Both contracts are tiny ($150k each) although obviously these may be pilot programs.
b) Finding evaders of sanctions seems like it should fall under a national security agency's purvue. We all take it for granted that the NSA could pinpoint our locations pretty easily, right? One thing that's particularly insane about the US government is how many departments have intelligence agencies. Obviously the ideal would be to have a small handful of well regulated intelligence agencies (emphasis on "well regulated", and you only have to look at the overreach by e.g. the CIA over the past 50 years to know that the US has had issues with that.)
c) The tax evasion contract looks at social media posts to find tax evaders. I wouldn't be particularly upset if the IRS had their own internal tech department doing this - if you're going to have a tax agency, you want it to be able to prevent cheating, otherwise the tax system falls apart. Finding people who have declared themselves to have beaten the system in a public forum is a cheap and easy way to go after cheaters.
There's a lot of pork in contracts that government agencies give out to private contractors, but this seems like a relatively low spend, and so it doesn't seem particularly bad that the IRS has decided that this is outside of their current expertise and given out a contract to chase it.
> We all take it for granted that the NSA could pinpoint our locations pretty easily, right?
In the same way we take it for granted that a SWAT team could kill any of us pretty easily. They have (and probably should have) the ability, but the authority to use it should be very limited and subject to stringent oversight.
No doubt. But, say that the NSA were given the purvue over enforcing sanctions (because they are the national security agency). Should they be able to monitor who is visiting the country with the sanctions?
Sanctions are kind of like the tax agency situation - if you're going to wield them as a national security tool, then you want to be able to enforce them, otherwise they're relatively meaningless. And enforcing them necessarily involves watching to see if your country's citizens are evading them.
We should be asking why the fuck this is for sale. Why is this okay? I hate this new normal but I look around and nobody cares. Nobody I talk to IRL gives a shit. This is our reality. How do we learn to navigate this strange new post privacy environment?
For a start, by opting out of as much of the "conveniences" that enable this bullshit to begin with. Easier said than done, but it's truly the most necessary step.
Why is because Congress has been captured by big corporations and their lobbying money for nearly a century now. Anything pro-consumer that stands to limit the upper bounds of profit (that doesn't literally threaten the collapse of the nation) is just a signal for their corporate donors that they haven't been paid enough that year to keep quiet.
Readit News
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/eff-fincen-stop-pushin...
You can help financially, and contact each of your representatives and senators and request they act to stop this end run around the constitution.
They really are the heroes of digital time. And they stayed true to their mission amidst the woke wave other organizations have been swayed with.
Soon as I'm actually making money again, they'll get some.
I don’t really understand why the species should put its faith in industrialist billionaires given the history.
Further, I happen to monitor corporate funding to nonprofits (including the EFF) and public reporting suggests EFF only received $7500 from Google in 2018 and $25K from Facebook.
Whereas Center for Democracy and Technology, which was founded by the former Executive Director of the EFF in 1994, received $430K and $500K, respectively.
See https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/face...
We also need privacy protections so these companies wouldn’t exist in the first place.
"Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I'm not going to pretend to know what the ruling would/should be according to the 4th amendment, though.
> Do you really want five unelected, unaccountable lawyers deciding this matter?
No but that's what happens when Congress is so split right now.
The real solution is to not allow the data to be sold to anyone.
Also, POTUS is in charge of most federal law enforcement agencies. So it might be possible to handle this at a federal level through an executive order. Obviously, this doesn't have the staying power of a proper law, but it's something.
If that's a comment about the bureaucracy working slowly as hell, that is reasonable. If it's about the makeup of the court, I disagree.
Kavanaugh and especially Gorsuch are two you want on the court in this case.
However, no one has gone as far as Utah in requiring warrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
https://www.wired.com/story/utah-digital-privacy-legislation...
It either shouldn't be collected or if it is then the sale should be prohibited.
Users must sign a consent statement to a terms of services agreement. That is a voluntary action where users erode their own privacy protections and surrender their contributions. Anything that happens later is completely incidental and solely between the data owner (which is not the user) and the third party.
Unlike private actors, governmental actors are publicly constrained in their actions and representatives of the will of our society.
Are you aware of the term 'unelected bureaucrat', and do you know how many of them exist? They are accountable to no one. They continually prove to be significant problems.
Deleted Comment
People say they want privacy, but people say a lot of things they don't mean. Instead I look at their actions. No one's willing to inconvenience themselves even slightly for privacy.
The context of this story is data willingly given up by users through apps or websites that people give permission to use & resell. A decade ago or more there may have been more of an excuse for consumers: awareness of just what was tracked and how it was repackaged and sold on to other entities was not as well known. Now there is little excuse: If someone installs an app and hits "agree" to the data it wants to access, or clicks "okay" to the browser popups on sites that want their location, that's on them.
Data legally (if dubiously) collected explicitly for law enforcement purposes that still require a court order to access is a completely separate issue in terms of giving up 4th amendment rights.
Not sure how that exception is being handled in the Treasury case.
The article specifically talks about apps as well, and that is a user choice. Web pages also ask for location data in popups: this can be denied to them, which limits (though only limit, not prevent) pinpoint location tracking. I never said all tracking can be prevented. I said that people give away their personal data. That is a true statement regardless of whether certain types of data are taken without their consent.
I think we're probably (mostly, or at least partly) on the same page here. But if you want to continue a discussion that's fine, but only if you review HN community guidelines on discourse and civility beforehand. Also not that I often go days without revisiting threads to see if further conversation on a topic would interest me, but I'll try to make a trip back to this one to check in.
The easy way out would be to make such information not suitable as evidence. Perhaps exceptions will be made for cases when there's a clear risk to public safety. (such as prosecuting al capone)
Slavery itself is also somewhat of a special case because entering into a contract requires the ability for each party to seek redress or other appropriate methods of enforcement. But once a slave, all personal agency is lost and therefore the enslaved party is no longer on equal grounds with respect to having the contract honored. It is an inherently paradoxical contract.
Contrast this with selling your right to free speech with an NDA: you still have access to all the methods of enforcement and redress if disagreements about the terms arise while the contract is in effect.
Legally, this is false, but obviously most people here would advocate for data ownership and control, even when it's transferred under a contract (regardless if it's via a checkbox, or signed and notarized).
I’m all for the 4th. But restraining law enforcement not to use public data?
Now should it be so easy to give up your rights to your data is a different question.
Dead Comment
Publish everything found, see if the laws are then changed...
Instead, collect it on every Congressperson and then see how fast things change. Most politicians don't have the means to scrub their backgrounds like multi-million dollar PR-vulnerable CEOs.
I have serious doubts about this.
As of 2011, the average Senator had a net worth of $14 million and the average Representative had a net worth of $6.5 million.
Presumably it has only gone up in the decade since, given the long bull market in everything.
https://ballotpedia.org/Net_worth_of_United_States_Senators_...
I don't imagine people with such amount of power and connections to just roll over because "they caught us with the hand in the cookie jar!"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers
I think a generation of people who believe the former statement have taken control of institutions, and we're watching it play out now. If you want to predict what this generation of bureaucracy will do, find the emergency exceptions and notwithstanding discretion to every law that protects the individual and limits the power of government, and then contrive the excuse that enables it, and this will be the policy and tactics of the people behind it. This Treasury collecting data story isn't about legalisms and principles, the people doing it really are nihilists, where language itself is just words that can mean anything, so it might as well mean whatever they want. Arguing under the false belief that principles and logic matters means doing nothing while they ratchet up controls and make themselves impossible to dislodge.
You aren't going to persuade the Treasury or other people involved in these plays with reason, as the prospect of total, permanent, tech-facilitated dominion means the stakes are too high for them not to make a play for it. Only the courts, or sadly, conflict can dislodge it I think. We need to seriously consider how much tech is causing our governments to metastasize, and what the options for mitigating it are.
There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people in government without accountability as leverage against you personally. This was paranoid ranting 20 years ago, and today it's just unpopular buzzkill. All that's left is to say "it was ever thus" and the only people who complained were the ones merely maladapted to the change and the inevitable progress of history.
I have one small revision: There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people without accountability as leverage against you personally.
The difference is that the government is, in some sense, unaccountable by fiat. At least with private actors we can have the possibility of accountability through legal recourse.
Steps:
* Allow (and encourage) private sector monopolies to form
* Use its leverage and influence to "encourage" those monopolies to do things which the US government is not allowed to do (examples: censorship, data collection)
The list of First Amendment precedents, for example, with respect to the government is long and detailed. On the other hand, private companies operate under fewer restrictions and can act much more freely.
So if we have a situation where there are a small number of monopolies and they, through personal relationships (marriage), lobbying, and the revolving door have a cozy relationship with the US government, then the government can effectively censor (for example) by more or less declaring "will no one rid me of these turbulent tweets" and have the monopolies jump to comply (or face increased risk of antitrust action for example).
This is a win-win for both: the monopolies avoid antitrust and other unwanted regulation by playing ball, and the government gets to ignore the Bill of Rights by "outsourcing" actions to what are in effect de facto quasi-governmental entities. It's only a loss for the people for whom the Bill of Rights was written to protect.
Deleted Comment
b) Finding evaders of sanctions seems like it should fall under a national security agency's purvue. We all take it for granted that the NSA could pinpoint our locations pretty easily, right? One thing that's particularly insane about the US government is how many departments have intelligence agencies. Obviously the ideal would be to have a small handful of well regulated intelligence agencies (emphasis on "well regulated", and you only have to look at the overreach by e.g. the CIA over the past 50 years to know that the US has had issues with that.)
c) The tax evasion contract looks at social media posts to find tax evaders. I wouldn't be particularly upset if the IRS had their own internal tech department doing this - if you're going to have a tax agency, you want it to be able to prevent cheating, otherwise the tax system falls apart. Finding people who have declared themselves to have beaten the system in a public forum is a cheap and easy way to go after cheaters.
There's a lot of pork in contracts that government agencies give out to private contractors, but this seems like a relatively low spend, and so it doesn't seem particularly bad that the IRS has decided that this is outside of their current expertise and given out a contract to chase it.
In the same way we take it for granted that a SWAT team could kill any of us pretty easily. They have (and probably should have) the ability, but the authority to use it should be very limited and subject to stringent oversight.
Sanctions are kind of like the tax agency situation - if you're going to wield them as a national security tool, then you want to be able to enforce them, otherwise they're relatively meaningless. And enforcing them necessarily involves watching to see if your country's citizens are evading them.