The report concludes government agencies have been buying huge amounts of “commercially available information” (or CAI) from the open market. It admits the information resembles something only dedicated government surveillance would once have produced, calling it “of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained, if at all, only through targeted (and predicated) collection.”
The
report from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was requested by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who once warned that the US could become an “irreversible surveillance state” if personal digital data collection continued to grow. It was prepared by ODNI in January 2022 and only declassified last week.
As the report points out, commercially available information falls under the same legal category as publicly available data, despite being highly sensitive. That lets government entities do an end run around normal legal protections afforded by legislation or court rulings that require a warrant and probable cause. In 2018, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that smartphone location data is protected by the “illegal search and seizure” clause of the Fourth Amendment but it doesn’t seem to matter when the data can be bought openly.
