US Government Has Secretly Used Data Brokers to Amass Information on Citizens

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Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that a group of senior advisers warned Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, that the US government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens by buying troves of “publicly available” information from data brokers.

Haines had tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. Under pressure from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the report was declassified and released by the ODNI, which has been embroiled in a legal fight with the digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) over a host of related documents. 

The …