Admission came during questioning at Senate intelligence committee worldwide threats hearing
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has started buying location data on Americans, Kash Patel, FBI director, said under oath at the Senate intelligence committee worldwide threats hearing on Wednesday.
Patel’s admission came in response to a question from the senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who is a longtime opponent of the warrantless surveillance of Americans. Wyden told Patel that his predecessor, Christopher Wray, testified in 2023 that the FBI did not at that time purchase location data derived from internet advertising, although he acknowledged that it had done so in the past.
If you’re surprised by this, you’ve either not been paying attention, are incredibly naive, or just are an idiot.
This is Palantir’s business model.
This is what an information economy looks like.
The infobrokers, datahoarders… they sell to anyone with the money.
They’re the platform.
Governments and other corps are the clients.
But laws, you say!
They prevent this, this can’t be legal!
Again, you haven’t been paying attention, or somehow can’t compute that fascist don’t care about laws … they just do things, and dare you to stop them, and that applies to anything.
We never fixed the PATRIOT ACT.
We never got rid of the secret, classified courts that authorize the warrants for this.
It all only got worse, the wound went gangrenous, people just got used to it or something.
This is the logical, predictable result of ‘but I have nothing to hide.’
Their reasoning about getting around the law is that if it’s commercially available, it isn’t government surveillance. And I can’t really argue with that. It’s immoral but it’s not illegal.
Well, we could pass a law, or even ammendment, that defines a kind of bill of rights for digital data privacy.
But that would require a functioning, non corrupt government.
Which would have required countermanding Citizens United with something similar, a big law or ammendment.
But nope, instead we have a corrupt system that cannot be fixed from the inside, that now is just openly, nakedly corrupt and arbitrary.
I mean I am surprised by this. Mostly because they are having to pay for it. Figured they would have their own way to do so and would be the ones selling the data
Then you have not been paying attention.
Something like the 5th or 6th largest datacenter in the world is the Utah Datacenter.
Its run by the NSA, is over 10 years old.
What does it do?
It stores everything, everything it can get its hands on, via the NSA’s wiretaps/datafeeds from every ISP in the US, and a good number outside of it.
Their problem literally was that they had so much data, that they could not quickly, usefully, search through it all.
… Enter the well connected, recently started up contractor Palantir.
They solve that problem.
This shit has all been in the news.
Most people just don’t pay attention.
If they do it themselves they open themselves up to a lot more issues than simply buying it.