Senator Ron Wyden is asking the Justice Department to investigate how foreign countries could be spying on your phone data through your push notifications. Wyden’s office has spent years investigating this issue, and now they want the DOJ to take action. 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: Senator Ron Wyden is asking the Justice Department to investigate how foreign countries could be spying on your phone data through your push notifications. Wyden’s office has spent years investigating this issue, and now they wanna take it to the DOJ and plead with the DOJ, please take action. I’ve been talking to you about it for years. Talk about how this works.
Farron Cousins: This is a really kind of complicated, yet, if you’re a foreign government, it’s actually a bit of a brilliant scheme here.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It is.
Farron Cousins: Because we’re talking about in every country, essentially the public airwaves. So when your phone sends you a notification, hey, your game is ready for you to play. A reward is ready. Your map says you gotta take a turn. Those are push notifications that come through your phone. But by doing that, they’re of course, using this public space, these public airwaves, whatever. So foreign governments are allowed to say, oh.
Mike Papantonio: We want access to that.
Farron Cousins: Well, you know, this is coming across our towers. This is coming across our signals. We as the government have every right to see what’s happening. And Ron Wyden’s office said in a report last week, they said, listen, they’re using this to get your messages because your messages come across through a push notification. They’re getting emails, they’re getting your location data. They’re getting everything you do, because they can access these notifications.
Mike Papantonio: And Apple and Google, they have the information, but they’re unwilling to share it because they know where that goes. This is just the very tip of the iceberg. They can’t share this information. That’s why they’re refusing to do it. That’s why Wyden is trying to demand, tell us who has been affected by this. You have the information. We wanna know who the people are. Right.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And doesn’t this remind you a lot of, because we were doing segments back then, back during the FISA years where you had the AT&T and you had these other cell carriers say, oh yeah, we’ve given up data on American citizens, but we can’t tell you who, because that’s just a breach of confidence. But it’s the same thing today. It’s just different people doing different things for different countries.
Mike Papantonio: The tech industry has just become so arrogant.
Farron Cousins: They really have.
Mike Papantonio: They’ve just become so arrogant. That’s why I’m so excited about the lawsuits we’re bringing out, bringing against them, social media lawsuits. The stuff we’re finding already is appalling and what the DOJ won’t do, and what the government won’t do, we will do, we’ll do in a courtroom, and we will ask the questions and take discovery. I just don’t understand why the Department, why Wyden has for years told the Department of Justice, this is serious, man. Pay attention. They won’t do it.
Farron Cousins: Well, Wyden has been great on the whole range of issues with big tech. He is one of the few that’s always been solid. He was solid on the surveillance breaches and breach of trust on all that. And he is still just the loudest voice, usually one of the only voices sounding the alarm.
Mike Papantonio: Well, there’s one more I read that’s on this bill. I forgot who it was, but another Democrat. And of course, there’s no Republicans coming up and saying, yeah, we oughta do something about this.
