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The Patriot Pony Bonus Section
Monday, October 3, 2022
Big Brother watching? Government agencies buying cell phone, internet data to track Americans A growing partnership between third party data brokers and law enforcement agencies is raising alarm bells among civil liberties lawyers.
EDITOR’S NOTE—This section is reserved as an editorial and may not necessarily reflect the policy of this publication.
Do you remember the Takata airbag recall? The Takata corporation made defective airbag charges that would explode, sometimes spontaneously, and send pieces of metal shrapnel into the faces and necks of drivers. In 2014 one young lady died and a dozen more were wounded. That one death prompted the historic record recall of 65 million vehicles in the U.S. and a fine of $200 million against Takata. Over the next few years more drivers died. 17 in the US and 27 world wide. Now look at the gene injection for COVID. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, no recall, no admission of responsibility. The deaths continue. What’s the difference? The manufacturers have no liability for injuries and deaths from the use of their products. ***** The ending of the annexation ceremony in Moscow was quite impressive. Western mainstream media has us to believe that morale is dreadfully low in Russia. We’re told their military is crumbling and their economy is in tatters. But video of the annexation ceremony shows a vastly different picture. Our mainstream media here in the United States is pure propaganda full of lies, illusions, and manipulations. We now can understand why western big tech and western governments banned all social media and news that Russians put out. Your opinion of Russia is solely based on what the west has told you. This is war in 2022.
used the Fog data for a wide range of investigations, from the murder of By Aaron Kliegman a nurse in Arkansas to In a little noted trend, law tracking the movements of a potential participant enforcement agencies at every level of government in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the Associated Press reare increasingly buying ported. data from private, thirdparty data brokers on According to Fog, it's Americans' phone and internet activities in order providing a helpful serto track them, often with- vice so law enforcement agencies can better do out a warrant. their jobs. While proponents say this "Local law enforcement is practice provides critical at the front lines of trafhelp for investigations, ficking and missing percritics argue it poses a sons cases, yet these deserious violation of civil partments are often beliberties that needs to be addressed through legisla- hind in technology adoption," Matthew Broderick, tion. a Fog managing partner, told the AP. "We fill a gap One of the latest revelations about this controver- for underfunded and unsial public-private partner- derstaffed departments." ship came from the ElecOthers see the arrangetronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated ment as a violation of Americans' civil liberties to "defending civil liberand the U.S. Constitution. ties in the digital world." EFF recently obtained a trove of records through Freedom of Information Act requests on local and state police departments, as well as federal entities, purchasing a cellphone tracking tool that can monitor people's movements going back months in time. The tool, Fog Reveal, is a product of the company Fog Data Science, which claims it has "billions" of data points about "over 250 million" devices that can be used to learn where people work, live, and associate. Fog has past or ongoing contractual relationships with at least 18 local, state, and federal law enforcement clients, according to the documents reviewed by EEF. Law enforcement has
"Reporting and a recent investigation by EFF confirms that law enforcement across the country is regularly getting access to our private movements — with the ability to retrace our daily lives — often without a warrant," Aaron Mackey, senior staff attorney for EEF, told Just the News. "This is an end-run around the Fourth Amendment and permits broad surveillance that can sweep up anyone who happens to be near the scene of a crime." Law enforcement agencies are getting much of this information from data brokers such as Fog, which harvest consumers' location data from app developers and then sell it to the agencies. Specifically, various smartphone apps request
location access in order to enable certain features. Once a person grants that access, the app is able to share it with other parties. Data brokers strike deals with the app developers — or with other data brokers — through various arrangements to obtain the information and sell it.
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Outsourced censorship: Feds used private entity to target millions of social posts in 2020 Biden administration gave millions in tax dollars to groups after election, records show. Election Integrity Partnership says it had 35% success rate getting tech platforms to label, remove or restrict content.
By Greg Piper and John Solomon
A consortium of four private groups worked Many private entities, with the departments of such as hedge funds and Homeland Security marketing firms, buy this (DHS) and State to cenlocation data for business sor massive numbers of purposes. However, other social media posts they clients are from the gov- considered misinforernment — namely feder- mation during the 2020 al, state, and local law election, and its members enforcement, as well as then got rewarded with military and intelligence millions of federal dollars agencies. from the Biden administration afterwards, acThe government's interest cording to interviews and in such data extends bedocuments obtained by yond phones to internet Just the News. usage. The Election Integrity Multiple branches of the Partnership is back in U.S. military have bought action again for the 2022 access to an internet mon- midterm elections, raisitoring tool that claims to ing concerns among civil cover over 90% of the libertarians that a chilling world's internet traffic and new form of publiccan also provide access to private partnership to people's email data, evade the First Amendbrowsing history, and oth- ment's prohibition of er information such as government censorship their sensitive internet may be expanding. cookies, according to documents reviewed by Vice The consortium is comlast week. prised of four member organizations: Stanford The documents reveal the Internet Observatory sale and use of a monitor- (SIO), the University of ing tool called Augury, Washington's Center for which is developed by the an Informed Public, the cybersecurity firm Team Atlantic Council's Digital Cymru and bundles a Forensic Research Lab, massive amount of data and social media analyttogether and makes it ics firm Graphika. It set available to government up a concierge-like serand corporate customers vice in 2020 that allowed as a paid service. federal agencies like Homeland's CybersecuriVice found that the U.S. ty Infrastructure Security Navy, Army, Cyber Com- Agency (CISA) and mand, and the Defense State's Global EngageCounterintelligence and ment Center to file Security Agency have "tickets" requesting that collectively paid at least online story links and $3.5 million to access Au- social media posts be (Continued on page 16) censored or flagged by Big Tech. Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded col-
laboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access. In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through midNovember 2020, with "monitoring intensif [ying] significantly" the week before and after Election Day. The tickets sought removal, throttling and labeling of content that raised questions about mail-in ballot integrity, Arizona's "Sharpiegate," and other election integrity issues of concern to conservatives. The consortium achieved a success rate in 2020 that would be enviable for baseball batters: Platforms took action on 35% of flagged URLs, with 21% labeled, 13% removed and 1% softblocked, meaning users had to reject a warning to see them. The partnership couldn't determine how many were downranked. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any laws that abridge free speech, and courts have ruled that prohibition extends to federal agencies funded by the legislative branch. Participants were acutely aware that federal agencies' role in the effort strayed into uncharted legal territory. For instance, SIO's Renee DiResta said in a CISA Cybersecurity Summit video in 2021 that the operation faced "unclear legal authori-
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