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The US Navy Bought Surveillance Data Through Adtech Company Owned by Military Contractor Which Harvests Location Data From Smartphones

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 13, 2023

A report from 404 Media, for the most part based on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, has put the pieces of a puzzle together to reveal that the US Navy was in business with an adtech company – that “just” happened to be owned by a major military contractor.

The company, nContext, is owned by Sierra Nevada Corporation, and what this triangle of surveillance was “keeping in the family” is the business of personal data changing hands, and reportedly, global (globally collected) data, at that.

404 Media writes that the public records it has seen show that the Navy was able to use a software tool (called, the Sierra Nevada nContext Vanir) that the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) uses for its surveillance operations around the world.

nContext, supposedly in the adtech (i.e., marketing) business, is behind developing that tool. However, the publicly available documents do not detail what kind of data the company had at its disposal, that was up for sale.

Above all, this is yet another example of how the ad industry – supposedly innocuous, other than for the suspicious amount of money it generates – actually can, and does at times work in insidious ways.

With this context in mind, the complexity and murkiness of the industry is perhaps not haphazard, but there to muddle up things as much as possible: because what this case shows is that an ad company can be collecting people’s data, allegedly for ad purposes (in and of itself, a highly controversial business) – but it then also gets available to all sorts of contractors, including those working closely with the US government, including the military and law enforcement.

The big picture: a government/country that is actively creating workarounds around its own laws and Constitution, which are supposed to mandate protecting citizens (including their right to privacy) – in this case, their private digital data.

“Crucially, when government agencies buy this data from a commercial entity, they can bypass legal restrictions put in place to protect the transfer and use of that information” – is how 404 Media describes this in its report.

In the specific case explored here, and in some previous Wall Street Journal articles, it appears that the information in question is location data taken from people’s phones and computers.

Related: FBI admits to buying geolocation data

December 13, 2023 - Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | ,

1 Comment »

  1. “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.”—
    George Orwell, 1984

    “When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed.”
    Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged

    “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.”
    Ayn Rand

    Like

    peterjohnarnold's avatar Comment by peterjohnarnold | December 14, 2023 | Reply


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