Oh Look, It Was Trivial To Buy Troop And Intelligence Officer Location Data From Dodgy, Unregulated Data Brokers
There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn’t pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this privacy dysfunction to dodge domestic surveillance warrants.
If we imposed safeguards on consumer data, everybody from app makers to telecoms would make billions less per quarter. So our corrupt lawmakers pretend the vast human harms of our greed are a distant and unavoidable externality. Unless the privacy issues involve some kid tracking rich people on their planes, of course, in which case Congress moves with a haste that would break the sound barrier.
So as a result, we get a steady stream of scandals related to the over-collection and monetization of wireless location data, posing no limit of public safety, market trust, or national security issues. Including, for example, stalkers using location data to track and harm women. Or radical right wing extremists using it to target vulnerable abortion clinic visitors with health care disinformation.
Even when U.S. troop safety is involved U.S. officials have proven too corrupt and incompetent to act. Just the latest case in point: Wired this week released an excellent new report documenting how it was relatively trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany:
“A collaborative analysis of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based data broker provides extraordinary insight into the daily routines of US service members. The findings also provide a vivid example of the significant risks the unregulated sale of mobile location data poses to the integrity of the US military and the safety of its service members and their families overseas.”
The data purchased by Wired doesn’t just track troops as they head out for a weekend at the bars. It provides granular, second-by-second detail of their movements around extremely sensitive facilities:
“We tracked hundreds of thousands of signals from devices inside sensitive US installations in Germany. That includes scores of devices within suspected NSA monitoring or signals-analysis facilities, more than a thousand devices at a sprawling US compound where Ukrainian troops were being being trained in 2023, and nearly 2,000 others at an air force base that has crucially supported American drone operations.”
Wired does note that the FTC is poised to file several lawsuits recognizing these kinds of facilities as protected sites, though it’s unclear those suits will survive Lina Khan’s inevitable ouster under a Trump administration looking to dismantle the federal regulatory state for shits and giggles.
When our underfunded and undermined regulators have tried to hold wireless companies or app makers accountable, they’re routinely derailed by either a Republican Congress (like when the GOP in 2017 killed FCC broadband privacy rules before they could even take effect), or more recently by a Trump Supreme Court keen to declare all federal consumer protection effectively illegal.
Even the most basic of FCC efforts to impose a long overdue fine against AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have run aground thanks to the Trump-stocked 5th, 6th, and Supreme Court efforts to block anything even vaguely resembling corporate oversight. I’m told by the nation’s deepest thinkers that this corruption and greed is, somehow, “populism.”
Time and time and time again the U.S. has prioritized making money over protecting consumer privacy, market health, or national security. And it’s certain to only get worse during a second Trump term stocked with folks like new FCC boss Brendan Carr, dedicated to ensuring his friends at AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile never face anything close to accountability for anything, ever.
At some point there will be a privacy scandal involving location data that’s so horrific, Congress will be forced to act. I’m just not particularly excited to see what that scandal looks like. To dislodge our corrupt apathy, it will most assuredly have to involve the data of the rich and powerful, and it most likely will involve the loss of life.
At which point, policymakers will stand around with an idiotic look on their faces pretending to not know exactly how things got to this point. And even then their solution will probably be a loophole-filled law, ghost written by AT&T and Facebook, that doesn’t get close to fixing the actual problem.