I Pay Plenty For Google.

You know, I never can get what I want with Google searches. News searches, information, quotes, reverse image searches. And I thought maybe it was me. I was using the wrong terms. Maybe the information was obscure, so Google wouldn't have it. But now I realize. It's not me. It's Google.

And they say it's free? No it isn't. I have to sift thru all those adds. And then like I said above, it's all for nothing.

And we pay Google in other ways. With our trust. With our confidence. And then they let us all down like I just described.

 

with our information & data.

U.S. Spy Agencies Know Your Secrets. They Bought Them.
Commercial data brokers are providing the government with personal information that might otherwise require search warrants. Should that be allowed?

Last November, Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, hinted at a big change in how the agency now operates. “The information that is available commercially would kind of knock your socks off,” Morell said in an appearance on the NatSecTech podcast. “If we collected it using traditional intelligence methods, it would be top secret-sensitive. And you wouldn’t put it in a database, you’d keep it in a safe.”

In recent years, U.S. intelligence agencies, the military and even local police departments have gained access to enormous amounts of data through shadowy arrangements with brokers and aggregators. Everything from basic biographical information to consumer preferences to precise hour-by-hour movements can be obtained by government agencies without a warrant.

Most of this data is first collected by commercial entities as part of doing business. Companies acquire consumer names and addresses to ship goods and sell services. They acquire consumer preference data from loyalty programs, purchase history or online search queries. They get geolocation data when they build mobile apps or install roadside safety systems in cars.

But once consumers agree to share information with a corporation, they have no way to monitor what happens to it after it is collected. Many corporations have relationships with data brokers and sell or trade information about their customers. And governments have come to realize that such corporate data not only offers a rich trove of valuable information but is available for sale in bulk.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used address data sold by utility companies to track down undocumented immigrants. The Secret Service has used geolocation data to fight credit card fraud, while the Drug Enforcement Administration has used it to try to find a kidnapping victim in Mexico. A Department of Homeland Security document revealed that the agency used purchased location data from mobile phones to “identify specific stash houses, suspicious trucking firms in North Carolina, links to Native American Reservations in Arizona, connections in Mexico and Central America which were not known and possible [accomplices] and international links to MS- 13 gang homicides.” And one government contractor, as part of a counterintelligence demonstration, used data from the gay-themed dating site Grindr to identify federal employees having sexual liaisons on the clock.

Whatever the U.S. can do with commercial data, foreign governments can do too. Last week, President Biden signed an executive order to prevent certain adversary countries, especially China and Russia, from buying bulk commercial data sets about Americans, including genetic information and personal movement information. But the order didn’t address the issue of how the U.S. government itself uses commercial data to get around constitutional protections for civil liberties. That issue is now before Congress as lawmakers consider reauthorizing a key surveillance law, prompting a debate over whether it’s appropriate for government and corporate power to become so intertwined.

In January 2022, a group of advisers convened by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence issued a report on the changing nature of intelligence. The report, withheld from the public for nearly a year and a half, concluded that “Today, in a way that [few] Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid,” governments can purchase “information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained, if at all, only through targeted (and predicated) collection.”
It’s legal for the government to use commercial data in intelligence programs because data brokers have either gotten the consent of consumers to collect their information or have stripped the data of any details that could be traced back to an individual. Much commercially available data doesn’t contain explicit personal information.

But the truth is that there are ways to identify people in nearly all anonymized data sets. If you can associate a phone, a computer or a car tire with a daily pattern of behavior or a residential address, it can usually be associated with an individual.

And while consumers have technically consented to the acquisition of their personal data by large corporations, most aren’t aware that their data is also flowing to the government, which disguises its purchases of data by working with contractors. One giant defense contractor, Sierra Nevada, set up a marketing company called nContext which is acquiring huge amounts of advertising data from commercial providers. Sierra Nevada and nContext did not respond to a request for comment.

Big data brokers that have reams of consumer information, like LexisNexis and , market products to government entities, as do smaller niche players. Companies like Babel Street, Shadowdragon, Flashpoint and Cobwebs have sprung up to sell insights into what happens on social media or other web forums. Location data brokers like Venntel and Safegraph have provided data on the movement of mobile phones.


“Government agencies rely on mobility and location analytics to properly allocate resources and inform critical decisions, including combating human and sex trafficking, identifying food or health deserts, improving infrastructure planning and informing natural disaster preparedness and response,” said Jason Sarfati, chief privacy officer of Venntel, in a statement. “Agencies use this data within their approved scope of responsibility and in compliance with the laws under which they were formed.”

A group of U.S. lawmakers is trying to stop the government from buying commercial data without court authorization by inserting a provision to that effect in a spy law, FISA Section 702, that Congress needs to reauthorize by April 19. The proposal would ban U.S. government agencies from buying data on Americans but would allow law-enforcement agencies and the intelligence community to continue buying data on foreigners. The effort scrambles the usual partisan lines, with support from Republican firebrands like Jim Jordan of Ohio and Andy Biggs of Arizona, as well as liberal Democrats like Ron Wyden of Oregon and Pramila Jayapal of Washington.

But the Biden administration has been lobbying Capitol Hill against the provision. “I would not compare the way that our government uses data to the way that countries of concern are using data,” an administration official said last month on a conference call with reporters announcing Biden’s executive order. In a bid to convince fellow Democrats to vote against the proposal, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that the proposal to ban the purchase of data “would undermine some of the most fundamental and important activities of the intelligence community and law enforcement.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, pulled the reauthorization bill for the spy law from the floor in February over concerns from intelligence agencies and their allies in Congress, in part because of the proposed restrictions on using commercial data.

Many in the national security establishment think that it makes no sense to ban the government from acquiring data that everyone from the Chinese government to Home Depot can buy on the open market. The data is valuable—in some cases, so valuable that the government won’t even discuss what it’s buying. “Picture getting a suspect’s phone, then in the extraction [of data] being able to see everyplace they’d been in the last 18 months plotted on a map you filter by date ranges,” wrote one Maryland state trooper in an email obtained under public records laws. “The success lies in the secrecy.”


For spies and police officers alike, it is better for people to remain in the dark about what happens to the data generated by their daily activities—because if it were widely known how much data is collected and who buys it, it wouldn’t be such a powerful tool. Criminals might change their behavior. Foreign officials might realize they’re being surveilled. Consumers might be more reluctant to uncritically click “I accept” on the terms of service when downloading free apps. And the American public might finally demand that, after decades of inaction, their lawmakers finally do something about unrestrained data collection.

 

Google and Microsoft are proof the Tea Party, AKA the Pentagon, believes Americans are so stupid, we will pay them for security, because they won't give us a choice. My work, makes theirs obsolete. Its already possible to put a chip in every computer, that makes it impossible to hack the damn thing, and the Pentagon already has quantum encrypted laptops and cellphones.

Russia is running around destroying underwater cables with their submarines, simply because they can. Once the Supreme Court catches on, that AI think they're stupid, and can eat them alive, things might start to change.