Title | Phone Metadata Suddenly Not So ‘Harmless’ When It's the FBI's Data Being Harvested | |
Date | Saturday February 01, @10:42PM | |
Author | hubie | |
Topic | ||
from the turntabled dept. |
Phone Metadata Suddenly Not So 'Harmless' When It's The FBI's Data Being Harvested:
The government's next-best argument (after "Third Party Doctrine yo!") in support of its bulk collection of US persons' phone metadata via the (now partly-dead) Section 215 surveillance program was this: hey, it's just metadata. How harmful could it be? (And if it's of so little use to the NSA/FBI/others, how is it possible we're using it to literally kill people?)
While trying to fend off attacks on Section 215 collections (most of which are governed [in the loosest sense of the word] by the Third Party Doctrine), the NSA and its domestic-facing remora, the FBI, insisted collecting and storing massive amounts of phone metadata was no more a constitutional violation than it was a privacy violation.
Suddenly — thanks to the ongoing, massive compromising of major US telecom firms by Chinese state-sanctioned hackers — the FBI is getting hot and bothered about the bulk collection of its own phone metadata by (gasp!) a government agency. (h/t Kevin Collier on Bluesky)
[...] The agency (quite correctly!) believes the metadata could be used to identify agents, as well as their contacts and confidential sources. Of course it can. That's why the NSA liked gathering it. And that's why the FBI liked collections it didn't need a warrant to access. (But let's not pretend this data was "stolen." It was duplicated and exfiltrated, but AT&T isn't suddenly missing thousands of records generated by FBI agents and their contacts.)
The issue, of course, is that the Intelligence Community consistently downplayed this exact aspect of the bulk collection, claiming it was no more intrusive than scanning every piece of domestic mail (!) or harvesting millions of credit card records just because the Fourth Amendment (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) doesn't say the government can't.
[...] The takeaway isn't the inherent irony. It's that the FBI and NSA spent years pretending the fears expressed by activists and legislators were overblown. Officials repeatedly claimed the information was of almost zero utility, despite mounting several efforts to protect this collection from being shut down by the federal government. In the end, the phone metadata program (at least as it applies to landlines) was terminated. But there's more than a hint of egregious hypocrisy in the FBI's sudden concern about how much can be revealed by "just" metadata.
Links |
printed from SoylentNews, Phone Metadata Suddenly Not So ‘Harmless’ When It's the FBI's Data Being Harvested on 2025-02-10 01:07:22