Important Takeaways:

• The feds are buying mountains of your personal data and one day could use it against you
• …a new report for the nation’s chief spymaster, Avril Haines.
• The Fourth Amendment recognized Americans’ right “to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
• But Washington is mothballing that lofty standard for a new motto: “Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.”
• The latest federal surveillance tsunami is being spurred by purchases of commercially available information (CAI) that private companies vacuum up from data from smartphones, computers and other digital devices and trackers.
• “CAI Increases the Power of the Government,” warns the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report. “The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits.”
• Yet that’s what happens nowadays.
• Federal agencies have always been permitted to use publicly available information for investigations.
• The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that police need a search warrant to seize tracking data on a person’s car.
• But government agencies can simply purchase the same information from data brokers.
• Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) cautions, “If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due-process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance.”
• [For example]
• The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that police need a search warrant to seize tracking data on a person’s car.
• But government agencies can simply purchase the same information from data brokers.
• Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) cautions, “If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due-process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance.”
• The CAI rascality is only the latest federal surveillance scheme making mincemeat of Americans’ privacy:
  • Customs agents are entitled to seize and copy all the cellphone and laptop data from American citizens returning home from abroad. Any information vacuumed up is added to a massive database that the feds retain for 15 years.
  • The Department of Homeland Security browbeat money-transfer companies to surrender records of any transfer of more than $500 between any US state and 22 foreign nations, rifling a database of more than150 million cash transfers.
  • Drug Enforcement Administration launched an illegal scheme to treat anyone who purchased a money-counting machine like a drug dealer. That secret program blew up after a 2019 inspector general report.
• How many other zany federal surveillance programs have we not heard about?
• The answer is a secret.

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