Congress: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on … Americans?" Clapper: "No, sir…not wittingly."

Lily Dane

At a March 12, 2103 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Director James Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Director Clapper responded, “No, sir…not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps, but not, not wittingly.”

Here is a clip of that exchange:

In early June 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden began leaking information that revealed that the NSA does, in fact, collect private data on millions of American citizens via PRISM, that this was being done at the time of Clapper’s testimony, and that Clapper knew this when he testified.

Former SEC attorney: government claims it will protect your data but ‘it cannot honor that promise’

(Image credit: k0a1a.net/Flickr)

Madison Ruppert

According to a former attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), despite the government’s claims that it will protect your private data, it simply “cannot honor that promise.”

This is especially troubling given the growing presence of centralized systems in which massive amounts of private information is held, such as the Federal Services Data Hubauthorized by the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

The statement was made by Hester Peirce, who currently serves as a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and previously served as senior counsel to Senator Richard Shelby’s staff on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

What Facebook Knows

The company's social scientists are hunting for insights about human behavior. What they find could give Facebook new ways to cash in on our data—and remake our view of society.

TOM SIMONITE

July/August 2012

Cameron Marlow calls himself Facebook's "in-house sociologist." He and his team can analyze essentially all the information the site gathers.

Few Privacy Regulations Inhibit Facebook 
Laws haven't kept up with the company's ability to mine its users' data.

Photographs by Leah Fasten

If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world.

It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company's servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior. Some of your personal information is probably part of it.

And yet, even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn't actually done that much with what it knows about us. Now that the company has gone public, the pressure to develop new sources of profit (see "The Facebook Fallacy") is likely to force it to do more with its hoard of information. That stash of data looms like an oversize shadow over what today is a modest online advertising business, worrying privacy-conscious Web users (see "Few Privacy Regulations Inhibit Facebook") and rivals such as Google. Everyone has a feeling that this unprecedented resource will yield something big, but nobody knows quite what.

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Cell Phone Corporations Help Government and Law Enforcement Spy On You

Susanne Posel, Contributor
Activist Post

Your wireless company is tracking you with GPS, recording your phone calls and text messages . . . and they are selling the information they collect to other corporations, nations, governments – anyone willing to pay for the data. The US government is one of the wireless corporations' biggest clients. They are collecting yotabytes of data from multiple sources on all American citizens.

Congressman Ed Markey compiled a report with information from numerous cell phone corporations that showed just how much data law enforcement receives from prominent cell phone carriers.

AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile were requested to hand over personal client data to federal agencies and local law enforcement at an alarming rate.

• 1.3 million = total number of law enforcement requests for “text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.”
• 116 = average number of requests the tiny Cricket fields each day.
• 700 = average number of requests AT&T fields each day.
• 1,500 = average number of requests Sprint fields each day.
• $8.3 million = the total amount in bills that AT&T sent to law enforcement and government agencies to comply with their requests. (That was up from $2.8 million in 2007.)

Sprint, catering to the illegal data mining of government agencies, has also made their job easier by providing an automated web interface specifically designed for law enforcement which allowed them to retrieve more public information than from any other cellular phone carrier.