The disclosure comes amid congressional scrutiny and a Federal Trade Commission crackdown on commercial data brokers.
The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to Americans’ domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers, according to an unclassified letter by the agency.
The letter, addressed to a Democratic senator and obtained by The New York Times, offered few details about the nature of the data other than to stress that it did not include the content of internet communications.
Still, the revelation is the latest disclosure to bring to the fore a legal gray zone: Intelligence and law enforcement agencies sometimes purchase potentially sensitive and revealing domestic data from brokers that would require a court order to acquire directly.
It comes as the Federal Trade Commission has started cracking down on companies that trade in personal location data that was gathered from smartphone apps and sold without people’s knowledge and consent about where it would end up and for what purpose it would be used.
I’m surprised they buy it instead of just collecting it by default.
Buying it is the exact reason they can afford not requesting a warrant.
The logic chain is as follows:
They would not have the right to get that data otherwise. And for the most part, they probably wouldn’t get it (the amount of data generated by the surveillance capitalism is properly staggering and mind-blowing). But you sold it, and it’s fair game, so they might as well buy it with a tiny fraction of your taxes, right?
They probably collect it by default, and use that to figure out what data they need to buy in order to be able to claim it came from the data broker instead of their top secret collection source.
probably cheaper to pay for the data directly than to have to invest in engineers + infra + storage + people with the skills required to attempt to break/circumvent any layers of security.