December 20, 2013
|
Earlier this week, Obama's hand-picked panel charged with reviewing the nation's surveillance state
issued a set of recommendations that includes limiting the indiscriminate mass collection of telephone records and other reforms. This
came right after a decision
by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon issued a preliminary
injunction barring NSA metadata collection related to a conservative
activist (he later stayed the order to allow for an appeal).
However,
while it may look like the NSA and surveillance state are on the run --
it's too soon to break out the applause. The White House panel's
recomendations also
included the suggestion that
data collected on individuals should be held by telecommunications
providers or a private third party. There is a threat that this
surveillance state may simply reconstitute itself into an increasingly
privatized apparatus that the government can access through fees and
subpoenas.
VICE's Megan Neal reports that
so-called “data brokers” – firms that spy on Americans' behavior and
then sell that information to businesses looking to profit off of it –
have
become a $156 billion industry. Neal notes that the Senate Commerce Committee recently published a
report
looking into how these data marketers spy on Americans – the report
shows how these firms label Americans under various categories depending
on their financial security and other demographic categories, including
“Ethnic Second-City Strugglers” and “X-tra Needy.”
One firm named in the
report,
Experian's “ChoiceScore,” says that it “helps marketers identify and
more effectively market to under-banked consumers.” The consumers
targeted for data collection include “new legal immigrants, recent
graduates, widows, those with a generation bias against the use of
credit,” and “consumers with transitory lifestyles, such as military
personnel.” That's right – these data companies now want to spy even on
American soldiers, so that they can be located and marketed to by firms
selling cheap credit.
This massive private surveillance state has
many reformers looking for ways to reclaim our privacy. Federal Trade
Commission member Julie Brill
has called
on the industry to create an online portal where data brokers would be
open about their collection processes and consumer access properties.
She calls this initiative “Reclaim Your Name.” “Reclaim Your Name would
empower the consumer to find out how brokers are collecting and using
data; give her access to information that data brokers have amassed
about her; allow her to opt-out if she learns a data broker is selling
her information for marketing purposes and provide her the opportunity
to correct errors in information used for substantive decisions – like
credit, insurance, employment, and other benefits,” Ms. Brill she said
in a speech to the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in
Washington earlier this year.
Which
brings us back to efforts to reform
the NSA's spying powers. Earlier this month, eight prominent IT
companies, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and Apple –
published an open letter asking for reform of government surveillance
programs.
But as
The Nation's Zoe Carpenter
notes,
these tech giants are only advocating for narrow changes to how the
government can spy – they are not asking for or promising any reforms to
the massive private surveillance states. This isn't only a problem
because private surveillance in and of itself is harmful for American
privacy, but because the government has used the private sector as a
conduit for its surveillance activities.
The Washington Post, utilizing leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden,
reported earlier
this month that the NSA “is secretly piggybacking on the tools that
enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using 'cookies' and
location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster
surveillance.”
We also know that the National Security Agency
has been able to spy
on the communications of Google and Yahoo users without even accessing
the data centers of either company, instead choosing to utilize the
fiber-optic networks these companies use as an in.
What all this
means is that as long as private surveillance companies collect so much
data on Americans, the government has a proven capacity to access this
data. Thus any true spying reform must not only seek to tie the hands of
direct government data collection, but must look at the spying
activities of data brokers that both for-profit corporations and the
government itself want access to.
Zaid
Jilani is the investigative blogger and campaigner for the Progressive
Change Campaign Committee. He is formerly the senior reporter-blogger
for ThinkProgress.
No comments:
Post a Comment