By adding a single short paragraph to an application for a court order through the Stored Communications Act (this wouldn’t even a require a search warrant), the FBI would be able to order your ISP to divulge every website you have contacted and every app you have used. In cases in which the FBI has obtained a search warrant, it could ask your ISP to reveal every single piece of content that it has a record of you having viewed — over the course of years.
Our government-access laws do not require the FBI to tell you about these requests, and the FBI almost always forces a gag order on ISPs, ensuring that you will never find out.
.. What the new law would do is give ISPs the incentive and the congressional and presidential seal of approval to construct the richest database of Web surfing and app-usage behavior the world has ever seen. This will be a honeypot attracting the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies like flies.
With Washington’s Blessing, Telecom Giants Can Mine Your Web History
Congress’s repeal of FCC privacy rules could be data boon for Verizon, Comcast, AT&T
What if your telecom company tracked the websites you visit, the apps you use, the TV shows you watch, the stores you shop at and the restaurants you eat at, and then sold that information to advertisers?
In theory, it’s possible, given the stance Washington is taking on online privacy.
.. Undoing the rules, which had been adopted last fall by the Federal Communications Commission but hadn’t gone into effect, is a boon to Verizon Communications Inc.,VZ -0.09% Comcast Corp. CMCSA +0.32% and AT&T Inc., T +0.45% which are all in the process of building data-driven digital ad businesses to complement the broadband, wireless and TV services they offer.
.. The telecom providers had argued the rules put them at a competitive disadvantage to online ad giants Google and Facebook, which generally aren’t regulated by the FCC.
.. But online advertising executives say telecom providers potentially have access to more powerful data than the two tech powerhouses. Their networks — both wired and wireless — could give them a window into nearly everything a user is doing on the web.
.. “ISPs like Verizon can now start building and selling profiles about consumers that include their friends, the news articles they read, where they shop, where they bank, along with their physical location,”
.. If a consumer uses the same telecom provider for wireless, broadband and TV service, the provider could, in theory, track the majority of that consumer’s online behavior and media consumption.
.. &T’s defunct Internet Preferences program collected web-browsing data from some home broadband customers and charged subscribers who wished to opt out of collection an additional $29 a month.
Democrats Shouldn’t Dismiss Nunes’s Spying Claims So Quickly
If true, this isn’t the wiretapping of Trump Tower, as Trump claimed in his infamous tweet a few weeks ago, but it is spying in any commonly understood sense of the word.
.. While the answers might not vindicate Trump, they are legitimate questions. If it turns out intel wasn’t properly minimized, this is the kind of abuse that civil libertarians have long warned undermines Americans’ privacy, a Fourth Amendment right.
.. Intelligence agencies cannot share details about American citizens with no foreign-intelligence value. If Nunes is right, how
.. It could very well be that Nunes is attempting to give the president cover. He’s a partisan, after all. That doesn’t make the incident potentially less serious.
House Intelligence Committee Leaders Reject Trump Wiretap Allegation
President said earlier this month that his predecessor had tapped Trump Tower
“I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) told reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday. “You have to decide, Are you going to take the tweets literally, and if you are, then clearly the president is wrong.”
Over the weekend, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway suggested that the government had other ways to surveil Americans and mentioned the use of microwaves and phones as spying devices. By Monday, the White House had walked back Mr. Trump’s allegation. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that Mr. Trump didn’t believe that Mr. Obama had personally tapped his phone, but instead was talking broadly about surveillance.
.. “They’ve been all over the map,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the panel. “The reality is, I don’t think they have the foggiest idea of what was behind the president’s claim except maybe something he watched on TV. And I think the rest is designed to downplay, minimize or obfuscate the fact that the president said something that was patently untrue.”