The FBI has a new way of getting their hands on your personal data, without having to go through the court system. Instead of getting warrants, they are just buying your data from the companies that are already tracking your every move. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The FBI has a new way of getting their hands on personal data without having to go through the court system. Instead of getting warrants, they’re simply buying your data from companies that are already tracking you every move you make. There is no, you know, there’s no privacy. Okay. But I think at this point, society has gotten to the point where they say, I’m okay with that. You know my opinion, people don’t care about it. I think they don’t care that big brother is tracking them. Maybe that’s just like, maybe that was a sixties and seventies thing. Maybe it was only boomers who really cared about the fact that, that people were tracking them. I say that, but then I see the Generation Z, they’re kind of responding to some of this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Z the younger folks, definitely.
Mike Papantonio: It’s that in between that I wonder about.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. The millennials and the Xers, they’re just, ah, nothing matters.
Mike Papantonio: Ah, no big deal.
Farron Cousins: But this is so funny, especially, you know, when we pair this to the FTC Musk, did you violate user service data? And then the FBI’s saying, well, we’re just buying it. You know, we’re the ones actually taking your data.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: We’re the, and we don’t even have to go through the courts anymore because that was too exhaustive. It cost us too much money. So instead we take that money and we go to Twitter, or we go to Facebook and Google and we say, hey, um, we wanna buy the location data, just like advertisers do. They buy our data from these companies. And the FBI thought, well, that’s an easier way. We don’t have to go to court and justify why we need this persons data.
Mike Papantonio: Well, they have to get around it. You see, Carpenter versus the US is a Supreme Court decision. And in that decision, the Supreme Court said, hell no. You can’t just follow data. If you follow data, it’s just like, it’s without a warrant. We’re not gonna let you do that. So, the CIA, FBI says, well, we don’t even have to do that. We’re just gonna go to Facebook and Twitter and we’re gonna buy all of it. If we wanna know where you are at any given moment, it’s easy to do. We can do it without a warrant. And apparently they, you know, the Supreme Court’s gonna have to deal with this at some point. But based on the decision in Carpenter, I don’t know it’s gonna go all that well.
Farron Cousins: Well, and it’s very terrifying too for the people who think, oh, it doesn’t matter if they have my data, I’m doing nothing wrong. Okay. But what happens when your data shows that you were in a location where they just found a body.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You know, they just had a robbery. Suddenly the FBI bought your data and said, well, wait a minute, we can link up Mr. Smith here to this building.
Mike Papantonio: He was in the room next door.
Farron Cousins: And then it does create a world of problems for you.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
