NSA Director Paul Nakasone confirmed such purchases in his letter to Wyden, saying the data collected “may include information associated with electronic devices being used outside - and, in certain cases, inside - the United States.”
That might be a loophole since they aren’t requesting it legally they are buying it like any other can.
Yes. The answer to this isn’t to restrict what the NSA can do, the answer is to stop people’s privacy being a legally tradable commodity.
Most people don’t have any concept why their privacy matters.
And until something awful happens to them, they aren’t interested in learning it either.
Most people aren’t interested in learning anything, which was a hard realization to come to as an adult.
I felt so lied to when I left high school, having been told my entire life that people eventually grow up…. And now I’m 40ish and they really don’t.
I fully agree with that.
I love how our tax dollars and inflated fed bucks go to this. We pay to get spied on. We’ve gone far beyond full circle.
Thanks for sharing this, it reminded me to turn my VPN back on.
Sorry but that isn’t gonna help.
How will it not help? It’s an encrypted connection to a single server, and that’s all the ISP sees AFAIK.
This assumes the only source these companies collect from is your internet traffic. It’s not.
And even if it was, VPNs don’t protect against fingerprinting.
For the past few months I’ve been using kanary which is a service that searches for your information on hundreds of different data mining sources and submits deletion requests for you.
I started with ~225 exposures and it’s gone down over time but I’m still sitting at ~50 exposures and it seems to have plateaued.
This information was data like who I’d married and when, past and current addresses, family members, etc. None of which was gleaned from internet traffic.
Right, but you’re talking about two distinctly different things. The ISP doesn’t own the websites you visit. They only have a record of your traffic. The individual websites that you visit can bust your privacy through 3rd party cookies, browser fingerprinting, cross-site tracking, and a bunch of other methods created to circumvent the user security features built into the browser. Nobody shares that information back to the ISP for free. The real issues are that huge companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have scripts running on millions of websites, so they can track you everywhere you go. But they’re still just single companies. The linchpin is that they then sell that information to Big Data brokers like Cambridge Analytica, and Informatica. Those companies combine literally everything you do online, everything you submit, all your history, all your data points, and build these fully accurate pictures of you. You need to take proactive measures to prevent this sort of data harvesting that go well beyond a VPN. But your ISP doesn’t have these systems in place. So unless the ISP is buying your profile from Big Data, and then selling it to the NSA, having a VPN is enough to thwart your ISP, and the issue identified in the article. You still have to take a bunch of other precautions to prevent the larger issue if you truly want any anonymity, and they’ll probably figure you out anyways.
Elections have consequences. Vote in generals and vote in primaries. Tell your reps (and potential reps) that you care about privacy.
Haha… If elections had any impact, it’s long time ago we would have seen any changes… ! Every year the same parade, with the illusion of choice between a turd or a piece of shit… Either way, they both come out of the same a Hole and reeks the same…
Money = power ! Vote with your wallet instead… Stop buying unecessary things, just shut down your TV, radio, mobile… and open your mind to the REAL outside world, reconnect with your intuition, stop filling your body with deadly poison and stop being a brainless sheep (not saying you’re, it’s a figure of speech).
Than maybe we will see some real changes :)
You can do both. You always get the same shitty options to vote for because most people don’t vote, and even fewer of them vote in primaries or participate in the political process in other ways.
Can’t argue against that :)
