It's pretty crazy that our legislators and courts haven't addressed this loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to buy data that they can't legally collect.
idlewords said a long time ago that "If the data is gathered at all, the government can get to it; whether it is on private or public servers is an irrelevant implementation detail. The only way to keep data out of government hands is to not collect it". Nobody wanted to listen to this because taking it seriously would mean tearing down large portions of the ad infrastructure that keeps the tech industry humming. But he was still right even if nobody wants to admit it.
It’s not really a loophole. It has been affirmed and reaffirmed and reaffirmed again. Nothing “sneaky” about it, just the case law hasn’t caught up to the amount and quality of privately-held data.
More entities should be subject to the telco exception to 3rd Party Doctrine.
The courts seem to place little to no value on privacy.
Within simple interaction I agree, but disagree when it comes to aggregate data. Maybe I tell Amazon some info, Wayfair different info, and Vitacost something else. A 3rd party can aggregate that into a new superset that I didn't give anyone explicitly. This goes well-beyond in-store surveillance and expands potentially and in-reality to full-time surveillance: when your smart thermostat senses you are home, when your car is moving, etc.
I don’t like the government being able to do this, but common sense seems to dictate that in cases where the user has freely given out their information and where a private citizen can go buy that information, the government should be able to buy it.
For emails in the cloud, and probably other data, they don't need a warrant if it's 6 months or older anyways. So they probably can force them to give it out for free. But either way they have a black budget so we are fucked in many ways.
It's no longer that black and white since US v. Carpenter. It needs someone to try it again. In that case SCOTUS did cite Warshak[1], which while not binding over the whole nation, is persuasive and clearly the older 2018 SCOTUS showed their potential interest in ending the Third Party Doctrine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
As someone who brokered Lexis PII in a past life, what scares me about this is how dirty the data are.
That said, it’s not a loophole. State and federal laws make certain data public or quasi-public for limited purposes, and I can’t think of any reason the government should be prohibited from buying it for one of those purposes. The fourth amendment is designed to prevent the government from collecting information that is distinguished as categorically private by definition.
That’s the beauty of the current situation. Instead of government it’s private businesses that are building a surveillance machine of unprecedented scale. The Nazis or Stalin would have loved to have such infrastructure.
The Holocaust likely would have been impossible (or at least far more limited in scale) if IBM hadn't sold them the tabulators they used to collate census data on their Jewish population.
The government hasn't searched nor seized anything. This is identical to if somebody found out your favorite color is Blue, gave that info to a newspaper reporter, and the newspaper sold the information on the street for a nickle a paper. The government bought one of the papers.
It's by design. The politicians love the money from GEO Group, CoreCivic, and MTC for expanding prisons and incarcerating more poor people and minorities for minor infractions. I'm sure the politicians absolutely hate money from LexisNexus too.
How tempting would it be to use blackmail to influence a democratic election.
Given this national security blackmail apparatus exists how can we be sure this insidious rootkit hasn’t already been deployed?
Epstein was able to have bill gates in his back pocket due to knowing about his affair. Imagine having access to that kind of leverage on every reporter journalist activist politician etc. I can’t be sure the integrity of our democracy is even still intact
It's funny, because growing up I thought LexisNexis were just one of those guys I'd use to find academic articles from the school library system, like JSTOR.
Then I got employed by the collections industry straight out of college and found out what skiptracing is. There used to be quite a few skiptracing vendors: Accurint, Banko, FastData, to name a few. LexisNexis bought all of them. I imagine that the dossier they have on the average person dwarfs what the credit bureaus have.
I was flagrantly misidentified by Lexis Nexis and subsequently a recipient of a pittance resulting from a class action lawsuit many years later. I had to pay for and live out of hotels for several weeks due to their background check connecting me to a person from a state I had never lived in with a middle name and middle initial that was not even same.
The most dystopian part of this is that they aren’t good at the service they provide, don’t have competition or incentive to be, and as a result, people will get caught up in their destructive wake. Fully expecting The Trial to manifest in real life.
If you are giving data to someone, or having data produced about you, it is a good assumption at this point that someone is trading it, selling it or monetizing it.
With no effective data ownership or privacy legislation in the US, it will continue to be that way.
I used to work for LN for years. At the time, basically all their data comprised public records than were purchased from government agencies such as DMV/DOL, courts, county assessors, etc. This isn't a problem of "if you aren't buying the product, you ARE the product."
Not long before I left, they were integrating with insurance data, which expanded out of government records. No clue where they've gone since.
Yes, also people dramatically undervalue how substantial the absence of data is when it comes to profiling someone. Especially when you compare it to other data points, for example not having credit cards on record is enough information to start building a whole lot of other connections.
No, it's exactly what I'm describing... courts generate data about you, someone (LN as an example) slurps it up. Buy a house, deed gets recorded, data gets generated and someone slurps it up.
Buy a product with a CC. All of the half dozen to dozen vendors involved in the transaction will generate data about you and sell/trade the data to other people.
Sure, LN might have some really good profiles, but there are so, so many companies doing the similar things.
You can get a free copy of what LexisNexis has on you, just like you can with your credit report. The difference is that the LexisNexis report is book thick for most people. The amount of information far exceeds what the credit bureaus have. In my case, quite a bit of it was wrong but adjacent. It thought I owned a huge commercial building, which was actually owned by the developer of a condo I owned in another part of town. It also showed me making an insurance claim for hail damage on my brother's house. My brother actually did make a claim for hail damage and I did live with him, but that was several years after the insurance claim.
This is what makes it concerning when it is used by law enforcement. Way too many people have been railroaded by the system due to bad data, especially poor people who can't afford a good lawyer. If the judges, lawyers, and especially juries are told that LexisNexis is a reliable source of information because the prosecution wants to get that conviction they could send innocent people to jail.
ALPR Automatic License Plate Readers are a significant portion of this article, and they raise a lot of questions in my mind.
If the police have access to realtime info on the location of all vehicles, how is auto theft still a thing? How are gangs stealing $100k worth of tools from hardware stores and driving away scott free?
Are we just at a time before wide use of the data ALPRs provide?
The glib answer is that cops are lazy and don't want to do their job. Another is that even though the data is there and theoretically could be searched as you describe, nobody has built a system that a typical detective could reasonably use to actually conduct that search.
Also, professional car thieves would just start swapping plates if the cops started doing this.
It's very rare for a crime to be truly unsolvable. For the vast majority it's all about the amount of time and effort the authorities want to put in. License plate readers or not, if your local PD and the DA's office have decided to deprioritize auto thefts then there's nothing you can do about it.
I don't know why this is downvoted. In the car community, you hear TONS of stories about stolen cars. The owners have tracking devices, video with clear shots of the people stealing it with their faces, location of the car, plates of the getaway car, and every piece of evidence handed to them on a silver platter. And the cops never do anything.
Illegal immigration could easily be solved by giving anyone who hires undocumented workers a million dollar fine. The American economy relies on a cheap, obedient and disposable class of workers.
I'm not too familiar with trends in auto theft, but do know around coastal areas your stolen car (truck, usually) goes straight into a shipping container. Thieves do not stop to fuck with swapping plates or any of that Hollywood stuff, they do not care about every ALPR camera in the city watching them drive it across town-- this isn't CSI, nobody's watching those cameras and readying the chopper. That vehicle is getting shipped off to the South Pacific as fast as possible, long before anybody can be bothered to get a warrant to search a foreign container ship for a random container among thousands that might contain a stolen late-model Tacoma.
Same with those recycle-your-phone kiosks in the mall. You can find-my-stolen-iPhone all the way to it, but the vendor empties the tray and ships the collected phones to a parts shop in Brazil every night, before the cops can get a warrant to open it themselves.
Does anyone think this just applies to migrants and ICE agents? We are already moving into a minority report style future … or maybe better said we are racing towards it now.
This form asks for your address, ssn, etc. I'm wary of giving this type of a company more information than they may already have. It's like those opt out email links where you need to enter your email address. Are you opting in or opting out ?
Thanks for this. Sadly, but not surprisingly, it is broken with the following error: "A system error has occurred and we are not able to process your request. Please try again later."
Readit News
This essentially nullifies the fourth amendment.
More entities should be subject to the telco exception to 3rd Party Doctrine.
Doesn't mean it's not a loophole. The law is filled with loopholes that aren't sneaky at all.
This is a loophole around the fourth amendment, and it allows law enforcement to violate people's constitutional rights without consequence.
Courts seem to think that this information does not have an expectation of privacy since the user gave it away.
Within simple interaction I agree, but disagree when it comes to aggregate data. Maybe I tell Amazon some info, Wayfair different info, and Vitacost something else. A 3rd party can aggregate that into a new superset that I didn't give anyone explicitly. This goes well-beyond in-store surveillance and expands potentially and in-reality to full-time surveillance: when your smart thermostat senses you are home, when your car is moving, etc.
https://emailserverprovider.com/emails-texts-documents-older...
[1] https://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2010/12/17/court-finds-fou...
That said, it’s not a loophole. State and federal laws make certain data public or quasi-public for limited purposes, and I can’t think of any reason the government should be prohibited from buying it for one of those purposes. The fourth amendment is designed to prevent the government from collecting information that is distinguished as categorically private by definition.
What do you mean?
Seems like a really weak argument from here.
One is a commercial venture with zero license to kill or interfere with foreign political processes.
Dead Comment
Yes, it does. Hopefully, this practice will be made illegal in the absence of a search warrant.
Given this national security blackmail apparatus exists how can we be sure this insidious rootkit hasn’t already been deployed?
Epstein was able to have bill gates in his back pocket due to knowing about his affair. Imagine having access to that kind of leverage on every reporter journalist activist politician etc. I can’t be sure the integrity of our democracy is even still intact
It isn't. Our politicians are pretty much corporate puppets, fully "owned and operated" by our corporate overlords.
Then I got employed by the collections industry straight out of college and found out what skiptracing is. There used to be quite a few skiptracing vendors: Accurint, Banko, FastData, to name a few. LexisNexis bought all of them. I imagine that the dossier they have on the average person dwarfs what the credit bureaus have.
It does. LexisNexis and Equifax [used to be, maybe still are] the first two calls the US Marshals make when setting out to find a fugitive.
Dead Comment
The most dystopian part of this is that they aren’t good at the service they provide, don’t have competition or incentive to be, and as a result, people will get caught up in their destructive wake. Fully expecting The Trial to manifest in real life.
With no effective data ownership or privacy legislation in the US, it will continue to be that way.
Not long before I left, they were integrating with insurance data, which expanded out of government records. No clue where they've gone since.
It combines every source of public data possible, and even includes court records that are sealed or expunged
I thought the whole point of "sealed" meant that the contents of the case were off-limits to the public for any and all reasons
Buy a product with a CC. All of the half dozen to dozen vendors involved in the transaction will generate data about you and sell/trade the data to other people.
Sure, LN might have some really good profiles, but there are so, so many companies doing the similar things.
Something I literally have never been able to do, despite tons of trying.
If the police have access to realtime info on the location of all vehicles, how is auto theft still a thing? How are gangs stealing $100k worth of tools from hardware stores and driving away scott free?
Are we just at a time before wide use of the data ALPRs provide?
Also, professional car thieves would just start swapping plates if the cops started doing this.
Same with those recycle-your-phone kiosks in the mall. You can find-my-stolen-iPhone all the way to it, but the vendor empties the tray and ships the collected phones to a parts shop in Brazil every night, before the cops can get a warrant to open it themselves.
Crime pays when you think globally.
Eg if you opt out of credit agencies then you have trouble getting credit cards and loans.
https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#heading5d