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Many on both the Left and Right have criticized the bill, calling it the “Patriot Act on steroids” or the “Patriot Act 2.0.”

The last couple of months have been rough on the FBI. The Twitter Files let the genie out of the bottle, and now more serious allegations against the agency just keep piling on.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has revealed that the US Naval Investigative Service (NCIS) has a contract for “Augury” – a mass monitoring tool that reportedly covers 93% of the world’s internet traffic and provides access to petabytes of current and historical data

Millions of Americans’ everyday movements can be traced by police with the click of a mouse and possibly without a warrant, thanks to a data broker that’s selling phone geolocation data to state and local law enforcement, an Electronic Frontier Foundation investigation has found.

Over the past few years, data brokers and federal military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies have formed a vast, secretive partnership to surveil the movements of millions of people. Many of the mobile apps on our cell phones track our movements with great precision and frequency. Data brokers harvest our location data from the app developers, and then sell it to these agencies. Once in government hands, the data is used by the military to spy on people overseas, by ICE to monitor people in and around the U.S., and by criminal investigators like the FBI and Secret Service. This post will draw on recent research and reporting to explain how this surveillance partnership works, why is it alarming, and what can we do about it.

Two new reports from university think-tanks call attention to surveillance and profiling — including surveillance of, and action against, domestic and international travelers — by the Department of Homeland Security and its components.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used phone location data to track millions Americans in 2021. The CDC monitored curfew zones, churches, schools, neighbor-to-neighbor visits and trips to pharmacies through SafeGraph, a controversial data broker.

A new class-action lawsuit filed in California targets Otonomo, a data broker that harvests location data from tens of millions of vehicles around the world and then sells access to that information.

Imagine being filmed 24/7. Knowing someone is watching you the whole time, would your behaviors and decisions remain the same? When governments or tech companies promote “smart” cities projects, they talk about how having more data about us could make things better.  What they don’t talk about is the way having surveillance technologies embedded in our physical surroundings would change the way we behave and impact our fundamental rights and freedoms. 

News outlets entrusted with promoting transparency and privacy are also lobbying behind closed doors against proposals to regulate the mass collection of Americans’ data.

This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

Smart-home devices like thermostats and fridges may be too smart for comfort – especially in a country with few laws preventing the sale of digital data to third parties

US Defense Intelligence Agency has just confirmed that the US government does indeed buy your location data collected from your smartphones by brokers.

The Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement agencies needed a warrant to obtain cell site location info. The ability to turn third parties (like telcos) into proxy long-term tracking devices concerned the court, which decided this wasn’t permissible under the Fourth Amendment. Every American carries a cellphone. But just because they do doesn’t mean they agree the government should be able to track their movements with them.

The Feds are using the pandemic as an excuse to ID and track millions of innocent American's cellphones inside their homes. This past August, a Motherboard article revealed the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) had signed a $476,000 contract with Venntel, a cellphone data mining corporation.

This latest revelation will no doubt be an embarrassment to what is already looking like a haphazard biosurveillance operation being run by the UK government.

A Virginia-based software company founded by two US military veterans with backgrounds in intelligence has been tracking hundreds of millions of mobile phones across the world, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

The United States Internal Revenue Service says it purchased access to a marketing database that offers location data for millions of US cellphones, so the IRS can identify and track persons suspected of tax-related crimes.