My tin-hat alter ego says the three letter agencies are creating these companies for the sole purpose of then purchasing the data and skirting the law. But that guy is crazy. ha ha.
Why would the three letter agencies need to do that? There's plenty of money to be made by private businesses doing it with fewer risks of violating the law.
And the TLAs aren't interested in selling this info to state and local agencies, while that's probably the bigger dollar for private businesses.
It doesn't even need to be nefarious or direct. Companies founded by an "ex TLA employee" have increased credibility, and might even procure investment from openly CIA-affiliated venture capital firms like In-Q-Tel. And since the founder has a security clearance (they're "in the club"), the company will have no issues procuring government contracts.
I know one prominent TLA (nominally banned from domestic surveillance) that had a contract with a data broker 25 years ago. Third party doctrine lets them ignore 4A protection.
Nope. I built one of these things years ago to control a parking gate. We did a lot of legal review due to customer concerns. There’s nothing illegal unless you facilitate certain behaviors that vary by jurisdiction.
The police have huge networks. Almost all speed and red light cameras record 7-30 days of continuous video. Typically those installations cover most entry and exit points of a city. The DEA operates interstate surveillance on drug corridors. There are LPR hits and driver/passenger pictures from Maine to Miami, for example. All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.
> All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.
"Driving is a privilege" is a slogan created by authoritarians. The word "driving" doesn't appear in the constitution one way or the other. Travel is a right.
The 4th amendment only applies to the government, and has only ever applied to actual tangible property. This is being in public where there is no expectation of privacy.
Eh, the case law here is less clear, principally because automated surveillance at this scale has never been possible before. But its also unclear because this is a tricky zone for the (mentioned elsewhere) "State Actor Doctrine". Since there are legitimate, non-government uses of e.g. license plate tracking, that means the product and service is not, obviously, a state actor. So should the 14th amendment cover it? My gut feeling is "yes", but case law doesn't (yet) reflect that.
Did the founding fathers anticipate a situation where everyone, everywhere, in public, was being surveilled, ceaselessly, in a fashion that allowed automated tools to pick out individuals, but at basically zero cost?
"No reasonable expectation of privacy" presupposes that the potential invaders of said privacy are actual living human beings, who have to be paid for their time, and thus have to sleep, eat, excrete, blink, etc. They cannot be on the job 100% of the time without incurring considerable cost. Previously, perfectly tailing someone 100% of the time was reserved for the most valuable of targets. Now it can be affordably used on somebody with overdue parking tickets. Or whomever the summer intern at one of these shops decides is cute and has an easy-to-remember license plate.
The fourth amendment, of course, also applies to private actors when they become essentially agents of the state, by taking in a role traditionally within the purview of the state, so long as the state knows of the activity, more or less. If you would like a more accurate definition, you can search for “state actor doctrine” and you will find some cases about railroads drug testing employees and parcel carriers searching packages for contraband.
Well the 4th amendment does not mention a limitation to the government. It says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" it says nothing about limitation to government actors.
It does go on to talk about Warrants which are government instruments, and I agree that taking pictures of licence plates on public roads would not be a violation anyway.
But you can't argue that because I'm a private person, or that because TransUnion is not the government, that it's legal for us to go searching through peoples houses or papers or effects.
They don't need to create the companies. They just buy from them.
Anyway, license plate info isn't considered a search because it's in public, and the SCOTUS doesn't care about how scale makes what used to be tolerable, a very different beast.
I’m sure there are more than a few instances where TLAs legal said they couldn’t do it but they could buy data so they had an employee spin off a company and became the first customer.
There are always individuals and likely groups at TLAs who don’t have what most people would consider normal morals and/or think the ends justify the means. The CIA has been found to kill, torture, defame, bribe, and work with criminal organizations and enemy states to meet their ends consistently since their inception. Starting a company or organizing parties to create a company to satisfy legal requirements is about the least controversial thing they could do.
Some enterprising individual should purchase the data for the sole purpose of publishing activity of politicians, judges, and so on. I bet you the laws would change in a hurry.
Source? That sounds like it would run afoul of the 1st amendment. Most likely it's actually implemented as something vague like "intimating a public official", and prosecutors use the threat of a charge to bully people into stopping.
Or more simply, cop car detectors that publicly share where all police are in a vicinity based on camera footage. Just need some enterprising anarchists to let us leverage their ring footage. Can even do it real time!
It wouldn’t need to be a conspiracy. An employee of a three letter agency just gets “poached” by said company. Resigns from agency. Works for company, still keeps in contact with his friends at agency. Setting up those demos and meetings for their latest product are easy now.
That’s not far from the truth. A lot of these companies are located in Northern Virginia, and the sales people are tied into the intelligence community.
One of my managers at Samsung constantly brought up this theory that google was an extension of the CIA. Back in 2012 I thought he was nuts. Not so much anymore. Killed by google dot com is my #1 red flag...
And the TLAs aren't interested in selling this info to state and local agencies, while that's probably the bigger dollar for private businesses.