Why the fuck is everyone acting like this is new information. Did people forget Edward Snowden. US government loves spying on and will do whatever it takes to spy on you harder. Your so called rights are a sham. The US government will ignore them when it's convenient for them

Back home it was sometimes speculated that the invasiveness of background checks was to gather dirt on the subjects to hold over them, just in case.

As for federation/decentralization/whatever, it doesn't solve the mass collection issues at all. We already know how and where they do it (contracting with providers of all kinds and monitoring at IXPs). Unless we get off the Net entirely, there's no way to stop it.

If I read it right: the government is paying for commercial (phone) location data. There are 3 issues:

• creepy: the government shouldn't have this
• costly: they are buying it with our tax dollars
• comprehensive (?): They are getting everything (money can buy)?

If the government were to require this (like via a search warrant) rather than pay for it it would go through a mountain of legal oversight. It seems like the interpretation is: commercially available = publically available.

I guess what I would want to know next is: who gets access to this?

Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device's location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge's sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.”

Basically, they're buying the profiles corporations already have on you. It isn't just to sell you pasta sauce; your shoppers' card also helps build a government profile on you.