Simply put, if you don’t like the idea of the Government Tracking and or Spying on you, You need to stop the Corporate tracking and spying.
Before I explain just how big this is, I’m sure you have herd about how your cell phone carrier, internet service provider, all companies that you deal with online and those that you deal with strictly on paper who keep their databases online and susceptible to a hack or just data for sale for additional profit. When a company is hard up for cash, they will tend to sell much more than they would normally sell.
And if you have herd any of that news, it is old news as once you have herd of it, most likely it has been in practice for several years or more. What is scarey is what is in practice now and plans for it in the future, that most likely, you have not herd of.
While the Government may or may not be allowed to do certain tracking of you, Corporate America has little to no limitation as they call it “the tracking for value enhanced services”. The Government may commandeer the information from those companies at any time in the name of Law Enforcement.
So, they let Corporate America do their dirty work and just take what they want when they want it. Nobody knows when it happens. There is no search warrant or other court order. And this data can be used for political purposes.
I will divide this discussion up into past, present and future. Without any rules, the future is looking worse than Fahrenheit 451 (read the book).
The Past:
I only need one demonstration here to show how bad it is for what the Government is allowed to do with data being used for political purposes. The headline you will remember was CIA Director David Petraeus Resigns. Here is the story they gave you on the matter (NBC News). But the real story is how this was discovered and put to the public in our demonstration of how the Patriot Act / Freedom Act was used as I have always feared, for a political purpose… !
I first warned you back in 2012 In This Moot Post.
This was discovered by a FBI probe. Now how was it possible that a FBI investigator receives a request from a friend or J.Q. Public that states they are getting a harassing email that turns up into the reading of email of the CIA director and making those findings public information that leads to Petraeus’s resignation right at the time he was set to testify on the Bengausi terror act in Libya. Read a culmination of facts from the media at Wikipedia.
The facts here, while the media is not connecting the dots in the same way I am, seem to suggest that for whatever political reason Eric Cantor had it escalating what should not have happened in the first place, if we are to have some belief that the Patriot Act can not be used for Political Lynchings.
I submit that they knew the facts and created a very careful set of circumstances that is believable up to a point to bring the root info of the CIA directors private life to light at a time when it was most opportunistic for them politically. The root question remains… how can anyone start a investigation of anyone else where it evokes the use of the Patriot Act to investigate other persons, let alone Top Level Government Officials. They were to be using the snooping authority they had to look for terrorist. This tells me “They can connect just about any dots they want to make you the target of spying”.
The Present:
Despite the Governments use of Malware in high end internet switch networks that has been left in place for even the Chinese to use against the government that put the malware on those switches in the first place, Corporate America only gets upset when the data releases of said info cause customers to leave them in fear affecting their bottom line. Otherwise, they seem to be more than happy to make new methods to be able to track and predict people.
The Government does not need to create new methods for this data, it simply takes it without a court order using laws within the Patriot Act/The Freedom Act.
Present methods that are just hitting the media (been in use for a few years) include making a unique identifier of “you” in all data that comes from your cell phone when it hits the internet. This is done by packing “Header Information” or info that was not originally intended to be packed with a unique identifier that the carrier knows is “You”. Here is some info I found that explains it in more common terms than I possess. AT&T just announced that they will stop this practice. Here is additional Info on that.
It seems funny that it did not take long for others to capitalize once they knew the tracking data was there. How others have used it is not clear as much of it has never been made public.
Cell phone carriers have been tracking your movements as large retailers actually pay them to know exactly where (what department) you are shopping in and how much time you are spending looking at what products. This was a item, that you had a opportunity to “opt-out” of if you actually read the updated terms of service provided by your carrier. Not that you would have recognized what it was as described above. That was the intention. And just by your continued use of the carrier, you agree to those terms. If you are under a contract, you are trapped.
While some that do not understand the implications of this have said to me, “So What”, I then ask that person if they would mind if the Government was tracking you in the same manner and all have said they would not stand for it. They do not see the connection of the data. Because whoever is collecting whatever data, it can be taken by the Government at will.
Don’t believe this…
Why do you think that the NSA is spending so much time and effort trying to convince you that Google’s and Apple’s new cell phone encryption is such a bad thing for the country and it’s efforts to fight terrorism? And that is just one small piece of the big data pie. The Government (NSA Attorneys) has even made a very crazy claim to those companies that use encryption might go bankrupt because of the data encryption, just like Blackberry. And that is laughable because Blackberry’s encryption is one of the sole reasons they are still in business because of it’s encryption as that is what the Government uses to keep it’s calls from being intercepted. Read This on the topic.
I don’t have the time or room on this post to give you more examples of the “PRESENT” but if you just spend a bit of time on Google News on the topic, I’m sure you will have some reading for the next week. Most of this stuff is being reported but is never presented to you up-front (like being buried in the 6th page under pumpkin seed festival). That explains the public’s ignorance in the matter. You actually need to go hunting for it and connect the dots yourself.
The Future:
I do read a lot and stuff that most of us pay no attention to like patents that the banks, cell phone carriers and web hosting companies just to mention a few you might be familiar with are obtaining. It is easy to see that there is big profits to be made from knowing your customer, your potential customer and even folks that will never be your customer. The more personal and data rich a file on you becomes, the more valuable it becomes.
Comcast recently pushed out new cable modems. This was not optional (read this). If you had a account, you got the new modem. In this new modem is two wireless (wi-fi) modems. You only know it as one. the one you use. But the other is to be used as a extension of Comcast internet network that you pay the electric bill for. It allows for Comcast subscribers to gain access to the internet wherever one of it’s current subscribers is. Neat Idea. It also allows for MAC Address snooping of folks that pass by your location (a mac address is a manufacture code that is unique to each and every network device that is always present). A new means of tracking you anywhere by your WI-FI in your phone even if you are not a subscriber. Google had done this same thing at the time they were doing streetview maps photography in your neighborhood. There is no law against it so it will be done.
As I have said before, if that simple fact were not true then there would not be so many companies that you have never herd of, that there entire business is just that… collecting and warehousing you personal info and usage tracks of anything. They are called data farms. Feel like a sheep yet ?
While it would not be common for any company to sell all of the would be facts it has on you like credit card numbers or that you have a card with “Bank X” and the value of your recent purchases and habits, your birth date, your street address, your phone number and many other things like what store do you frequent and how often and how much you spend in the on a given day/week/month and your method of payment. Yes all of this and more is collected and sold to other retailers and data farms where a collection of individual data is put together to make a better prediction of who you are and what you are likely to do. You really did not think those fuel perk rewards and other “club discount cards” were not costing you anything did you ?
There is a fundamental problem with this and it is not what you think.
Because potential employers are using this data and you don’t know if the data there are looking at is accurate let alone it is being done in the first place. It is not like a credit report that you can just order a copy for yourself and review it for accuracy. How many businesses are making judgements on you based on this info you will never know.
Insurance companies can and do rate your insurance based on your address. They can’t even give you a accurate quote without it. The future holds that with this big data, everyone will pay a higher price for everything and those in selected areas or with certain tendency’s will get a discount on “stuff”. Or perhaps it could lead to a factor of collage admission, a job, perhaps whether the city or county paves your street because there are not enough well to do registered voters. They will likely have your political tendencies in that same file. You will never know it. I actually believe that this is not in the future, but is happening as we speak about it. You will probably know in a few years if someone blows the whistle on it. None of the whistle blowers so far have actually changed the equation of what is being done, just the knowlage of it. Cell tower spoofing is just the latest news on your privacy that does not exist. Read more on that here. This is not new, you are just hearing about it but I can assure you that it is being done by more than just the NSA. In fact, it has got so cheap to do that anyone with less than $1000 (less than one thousand dollars) and can read can do it. The future holds that you need to worry about that phone conversation you had talking about your boss as someone may email a copy of it to him/her.
Now give thought to how much some data is worth to have disappear for those running for political office. Would it truly disappear or only resurface to control the candidate if he won as a kind of extortion.
As I have said before, Data and Security have no business being used in the same sentence. They will never have a relationship with each other. They are permanently divorced from each other. Anyone telling you anything different is either dumb or lying to you.
So what could be harmful data held at some businesses that you enjoy will at some point be hacked by one of many actors including our Government, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Russians or just a hack from one of more than several million folks worldwide with nothing better to do but to try to make a buck off of other folks data. If only 1% succeed, it is a disaster for everyone. It is getting easier to do not more difficult as you might expect.
People are always asking me why, when it comes to virus and malware questions. Why do they do this ? A simple answer is… IT IS PROFITABLE and very few get caught and punished and more and more it is virtually legal. I;m not sure you can distinguish a cyber thief from one that does it legitimately according to the law.
It should be demanded at the very least, when anyone that is going to store information about you of any kind outside of name and address and a customer number, that you have the ability to see that data.
To also know specifically what data is being sold or given away and to who it is being sold or given away to. What does that entity do with the data ? They are not bound by a privacy agreement with you. Who are they and what is their purpose with this info? Who will they sell it to? Just a new place for it to be hacked.
If it is to remain legal to do, It needs to be a reviewable commodity by the owner of it . Just like a credit report. Anytime you are being judged by information, you should have the right to review it for accuracy. Just like a court of law.
Anything less will eventually take the entire system down and destroy what we now know as democracy. It is that serious.
Just remember that any data you allow anyone to collect on you is accessible to the Government. So if you don’t like the idea of the Government collecting this data, stop the company’s from collecting it. If anyone has it, the Government does too.
The reason so many of you are passive about it is that you do not understand how much of it is going on and what exactly is being recorded, stored, sold and the implications for it and once the info is out there. Right or wrong, correct or incorrect, it is out there forever. Someone is storing it. Think about that the next time you allow someone to use your web browser unattended on your smartphone or PC.