BusinessWeek: The Snooping Goes Beyond Phone Calls

[unhappycamper]

The Snooping Goes Beyond Phone Calls

Furor and confusion over allegations that major phone companies have surrendered customer calling records to the National Security Agency continue to roil Washington. But if AT&T Inc. (T ) and possibly others have turned over records to the NSA, the phone giants represent only one of many commercial sources of personal data that the government seeks to "mine" for evidence of terrorist plots and other threats.


The Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security spend millions annually to buy commercial databases that track Americans' finances, phone numbers, and biographical information, according to a report last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Often, the agencies and their contractors don't ensure the data's accuracy, the GAO found.

Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting.

~snip~

"Grabbing data wholesale from the private sector is the way agencies are getting around the requirements of the Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment," says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington and a member of the Homeland Security Dept.'s Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Committee.

entire article

[elehhhhna]

1. So the taxpayer pays for this data twice?

That's like a prostitute paying herself twice to do Karl or something.

Makes no sense & is obviously against the interets of the people.

[carincross]

2. "Total Awareness Information Program"

The government is denied by law from collecting certain types of personal data. But it would seem, from this article, that they can buy databases from private companies that can - and do - collect such data. Could not the government then combine these bought databases with the databases they have already built to provide them with the "total awareness" of every US citizen that was denied them by Congress when the Pentagon was forced to close the "Total Information Awareness Program" being run by John Poindexter?