What Wired’s Startling Exposés Mean for All Americans

​A recent Wired story about digital coordinates that track U.S. soldiers and spies to brothels and nuclear vaults in Germany might have attracted almost as many eyeballs as the record-shattering premiere of the Kardashians on Hulu. The Wired mashup of atom bombs and visits to an establishment called SexWorld certainly had a Strangelovian allure.
 
As Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron reported, the more than 3 billion phone coordinates collected by one U.S. data broker alone follows U.S. military personnel as they go about their business – from home, to dropping off children at school, to intelligence and nuclear facilities, to, yes, illicit nocturnal activities. These journalists tracked hundreds of thousands of signals inside sensitive U.S. installations in Germany that are legally collected for digital advertising. One signal tracked an employee inside a secret, windowless National Security Agency building with a metal exterior called the Tin Can.  
 
Such tracking does more than risk hostile actions from adversary nations and terrorists. The problem with a big stream of personal data is that it is like a dandelion – it wants to go everywhere. Take China’s vast surveillance state that links facial recognition, comprehensive tracking of digital searches, communications, and location history. It was built to give the Chinese Communist Party unprecedented control of that nation’s populace – where people go, their contacts, their messages, their private beliefs. But even one of the most tyrannical regimes on earth cannot control its own surveillance. Another Wired exposé by Andrew Greenberg demonstrates that corrupt officials are selling big chunks of data on China’s citizens to black market operators and scammers as a “side hustle.”
 
This is in keeping with the ethos of the shady world of online digital auctions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently took a step toward fleshing out a Biden administration executive order restricting foreign data sales. While the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have commendably tried to place some restrictions on the sale of Americans’ data, the global and shadowy nature of the online data-auction market guarantees that these actions will enjoy limited success. Departing FBI Director Christopher Wray has warned it will be very difficult to keep the mass sale of Americans’ data to domestic and foreign data brokers from the hands of adversaries. Just as spies don’t walk around with CIA badges, so too buyers for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea don’t advertise themselves as such. Many companies, Director Wray said, appear on the up-and-up but, through the use of ownership shell games, are in fact controlled by Chinese intelligence.
 
The potential for blackmail and interference in NATO’s response to aggression virtually guarantees that there will be legislative action in Congress to end the tracking of service members and intelligence agents. As Congress begins to research such a bill, however, it should take stock of just how wide and dangerous the tracking threat is to all Americans.
 
As Congress and the Pentagon look into safeguarding the digital data of Americans serving our nation abroad, they would do well to extend those protections to Americans at home by embracing the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act. Requiring probable cause warrants for the collection of Americans’ most personal information would be a good way to help further restrict the treasure trove of data – by telling the government not collect that data in the first place.

DONATE & HELP US PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS