" Anyone else in the world " cant build a criminal case against you using parallel construction tactics while bypassing American's constitutional right to due process.
I assume you're implicitly referencing that the FBI is skipping getting a warrant, but why do they need a warrant? Your information is already publicly for sale.
As other's have mentioned, it's not really an FBI issue, it's a general privacy issue - that companies are collecting, compiling, and selling this information and it's all legal. Which is darned hard to get people to care about - because it's convenient to give your information away. I know about these things and still use google for almost everything (I finally moved my business email to fastmail... but didn't yet bother to move my personal email.)
That's an interesting point. Wonder how foolproof/incorruptible the chain of custody is supposed to be for the provided data?
We've probably all worked on IT systems at one point or another that the outside world regards as really good, but the admins / ops staff know is really held together with sticky tape + bubblegum. Sometimes with data not quite being stored as it was entered (heh MySQL springs to mind).
Not enough any prosecutor would prosecute someone based on that data alone. However, I do see a case where the data provided could be used to further an investigation. And in some ways, that makes sense. The data is a clue, but it's not what is going to put someone away.
It's a log entry. A log entry is only as good as your logs and provides a clue for further investigation, but it's not where you stop the investigation.
I'm not commenting on the legality or whether access to this data is right, merely my assumptions on how this data could be useful in one aspect that doesn't necessarily need it to be foolproof or incorruptible.
The right to privacy isn’t exactly even a right in the US constitution, it’s a construction out of a combination of many of the amendments in the bill of rights. And as such anything that doesn’t specifically conflict with a part of the bill of rights is fair game for data collection on citizens. And, because the bill of rights was created such a long time ago, the idea of the government being able to buy such a massive amount of data on you from third parties that it would be a violation of your privacy isn’t exactly written in as a problem. The constitution is getting to the point where it really needs amendments to clarify things for the digital age.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
So what you’re talking about it more relevant to the question “should the FBI be allowed to exist at all.” Is a federal bureau of investigation something that the federal government is allowed to make under the constitution, and if so what sorts of situations and crimes are they allowed to investigate? If you don’t believe the FBI should exist at all, then the sort of argument you’re giving makes sense.
But what the rules as to the Federal Government’s allowed sphere’s of actions don’t say is how they are to go about pursuing those actions. (“To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;” is a right of the federal government, but no mention is made of how those tribunals should be structured or how they should function.) So we get to the question of “If the FBI is allowed to exist, what sort of methods is it allowed to use to investigate.” And that’s where the bill of rights comes in, excluding certain types of actions.
Or the general question could be stated “Is it disallowed for the federal government to purchase data about its citizens from private entities in pursuit of the rights it is granted by the constitution.”
So while the FBI buying data causes great harm for a few thousand, everyone else buying data causes moderate harm for pretty much every other human.
Is it already forgotten that the FBI used to spy on King and the civil rights movement?