Government Buys Reams of Data on US Citizens with Few Safeguards

WhoWhatWhy -   Back in the day, if an intelligence service wanted to surveil a person, they’d need to carefully follow them around. More recently, if that person were an American, they might get a court order to be allowed to track them electronically. Now, however, they can just buy that information from the providers of any number of apps who are selling the data of their users. That is one of the main takeaways of a newly declassified report compiled on behalf of the Director of National Intelligence  last year. Put together by an unknown outside party, the document details the intelligence community’s use of commercially available information . That term refers to the unfathomable amount of data that is now available on many Americans.