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In its Annual Statistical Transparency Report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence admitted to running 3.4 million warrantless FBI searches of individual Americans’ data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amended Section 702.
702 provisions include a freedom from requiring a warrant, but at the same time a prohibition on searches of electronic data belonging to U.S. citizens justified under that same freedom. What the transparency report reveals was that this didn’t stop the FBI from conducted searches on U.S. citizens using information gathered from Section 702-acquired information obtained by the National Security Agency (NSA).
The Washington Times reports that 1.9 million of these searches were done in the name of investigating Russian cyberthreats related to the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, and allowed for the collection of email, phone, and address records.
“For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans’ communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless,” Congressman Ron Wyden (D – OR) said in a statement. “Somewhere in all that over-counting are real numbers of FBI searches, for content and for noncontent — numbers that Congress and the American people need before Section 702 is reauthorized”.
At the same time, documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA) by Motherboard from Vice reveal that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) spent nearly a half-million taxpayer dollars on Americans’ bulk cell phone location data for various purposes which included tracking their movements, perceiving whether they complied with CDC restrictions, curfews, where they traveled to, and how they got there.
The data was collected by SafeGraph, a data broker which Google banned from the Play Store, and which includes the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors.
Among a list of 21 plans for Americans’ data published by the CDC are both COVID-19 related research, such as adherence to guidelines in terms of closed places and curfews, but also non-COVID related metrics such as so-called “point of interest research” on visits to grocery stores, pharmacies, gyms, weight management centers, K-12 schools, and even parks.
“The procurement documents say that ‘This is an URGENT COVID-19 PR [procurement request],’ and asks for the purchase to be expediated,” Vice details.
According to SafeGraph, the data is exclusively aggregated, meaning that it can only be used to create trends of observable behavior, without tapping into each individual’s personal data. However researchers have repeatedly raised questions about just what’s preventing someone with know-how from deanonymizing it.
SafeGraph works behind the scenes, as Motherboard has previously reported, by collecting data through developers embedding its software code in their mobile apps, which track the physical location of users, producing statistics and specifics that can then be sold.
