Piffey

A recent paper from the Columbia Business Law Review by Joshua L. Simmons shows how the government can, and has, been using fourth-parties to acquire your private information. The fourth amendment is supposed to protect us from unlawful search and seizure, however the Supreme Court ruled that acquiring data from third-parties is okay as long as you handed over that data consensually. This returns back to the Lawful Spying Guides covered earlier on this blog. The abstract of the paper starts with:

“Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming rates. The CIA, FBI, Justice Department, Defense Department, and other government agencies are at this very moment turning to a group of companies to provide them information that these companies can gather without the restrictions that bind government intelligence agencies. The information is gathered from sources that few would believe the government could gain unfettered access to, but which, under current Fourth Amendment doctrine and statutory protections, are completely accessible.”

(Columbia Business Law Review via /.)

Two private companies, LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, are explicitly cited as data miners for the US Government. Under the post-9/11 changes in law our government no longer needs to actually search a citizen to acquire a complete profile of their daily activities. By utilizing fourth-parties there are enough loopholes that the explanation of a collection of data’s origin becomes no longer relevant — it’s passed through too many hands. Essentially these fourth parties can legally disclose information to the government that would’ve been illegal if the same search, using the same methods, was done by the government itself.

While this gathering of information could have been possible in the past it would have never stood up in court. The trouble is with its — now — legal use there are a myriad privacy issues following the purchasable dossier of citizens.

First is the fact that a company is profiting off the circumvention of our rights. The fact that someone can actually profit off selling a generalized profile of you to the government, based upon your Internet activity, is absolutely horrific. Many would say that if you aren’t doing anything wrong then what do you have to worry about. The fact of the matter is that the content you consume can be used to generalize you as an individual. Show too much interest in radical Islamic sects this month while you were researching them for a paper? Welcome to the no-fly list. If you’ve done nothing wrong before should you be added to a searchable database like a criminal suspect?

The second issue is that there are no restrictions in place for how this data is gathered. The reason that the Constitution is so generalized is to act as an overarching document, to be radically protective. Is this data acquired using browser cookies, viruses, or other clandestine means? If there are no rules as to the acquisition then what borders of privacy are these data aggregators allowed to cross? After data has been passed through enough hands it doesn’t matter how it was acquired anymore.

The implication of the paper then is that there is an endangering of our Constitution. As a nation we’ve allowed our protection to be slowly chiseled away. The legal loopholes provided by many of the post-9/11 reactionary laws punch holes in our fundamental rights and render sections of our legislative foundation weak. Our rights disappear while we continually allow the complexities of our legal system to expand into a bagatelle.