A number of US House Republicans earlier this week asked the Biden-Harris administration to get behind legislation that would put an end to the current exploitation of surveillance carried out by data brokers – that happens to be warrantless.
The letter signed by nine members of Congress came after news of a security breach that reportedly ended up with personal data from 2.7 billion people getting exposed in a hacking operation.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
Clearly, that’s a number greater than the total number of US citizens, so what’s going on here?
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It’s because of data brokers, the signatories of the letter suggest – the “super-state actors,” as some might describe them.
The group said to be behind the breach, “USDoD”, is supposed to have released records such as names, home addresses, date of birth, and social security numbers, where this applies – of nearly 3 billion people in the world – simply because this data was centralized and available to one entity – National Public Data, “a major data broker.”
In the US, such breaches in the end amount to warrantless searches – i.e., violations of the Fourth Amendment. The letter from House Republicans seeks to shed light on the shadowy industry of data brokers, how they may or may not be funded by taxpayer money – and what to do about it.
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There was a legislative effort last spring in the House – the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act – which the Biden-Harris administration chose not to support at the time.
Now, those behind the letter would like to bring the bill back, in light of the latest incident.
Meanwhile, the very practice of government (law enforcement, and spy agencies), going to data brokers to satiate their need for personal data (of Americans) is suspected to be a workaround for the Fourth Amendment.
Regarding the alleged massive and global “USDoD” group hack, the House Republicans are worried that “this data could enable malicious actors to build a sophisticated dossier on every American that can cross-reference and validate other sensitive personal data obtained from the largely unregulated data broker industry.”
The letter also makes a point of the alleged hack happening way back in April – “which means the hackers had four months to mine, sell, and otherwise exploit the data in the shadows before the American public was broadly alerted to the theft. This is unacceptable.”
