The implication that their data is more important or something just seems like a ploy to get more eyeballs on the research.
The holy Grail of documents is the DD-214, which has every single piece of sensitive personal information a civilian has, all in one place, and we are REQUIRED to keep it indefinitely, to present it under a large number of circumstances. It's a complete identity package; full name, signature, photo, work history, residence history, dates, personal description, mother's maiden name, date of birth, location of birth, name of birth hospital and doctor. Then there's security clearance paperwork, which may be even worse, extensive un-redacted medical records, etc.
All of these documents are viewed hundreds of times by hundreds of people during a military career, scanned, photocopied, emailed, printed, all without any sort of authorization or even knowledge by the service member. It's legitimately scary. And then after you're out, all of this information is managed by the VA by people who have nearly unrestricted access to it, and in my case along with thousands of others, put on a thumb drive and taken home and sold to a broker. It's a life ruiner.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Form_86
The OPM data breach (2015) affected service members, civilian government employees, and other civilians
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
Hostile foreign powers are a problem, but so are hostile domestic extremists along with a large population of the mentally ill who over the last century have gone from being abused to being ignored, which means that while most of the mentally ill are harmless, nobody is keeping an eye on the ones who aren't. Not even after they get repeatedly reported to authorities by concerned family members (Robert Card, Ethan Crumbley, Orlando Harris, etc).
If I had to guess at a motivation, it's jockeying for reasons for congress to care about data privacy issues.
I am sure some enterprising person is going to purchase all the data on members of congress and release it at some point.
So? Their data IS more important from a national security perspective, as the study suggests. If you handle nukes, your personal information would probably be more valuable than the data of someone flipping burgers at McD.
If this framing - 'the data brokerage industry is in itself a threat to national security' - forces congress to better regulate the industry, I think it is a win even if the regulations will only target military folks. It's a foot-in-the-door and objectively a good thing for the US national security.
"Policymakers should consider the following steps:
Congress should pass a comprehensive U.S. privacy law, with strong controls on the data brokerage ecosystem. The most effective step to prevent harms from data brokerage for all Americans would be a strong, comprehensive privacy law."
"Everyone's car is getting stolen these days" ... "Yeah, isn't that crazy? What are ya gonna do?"
"Your car is getting stolen right now" ... "Wait, what!?!?"
I think people really just write off the scale and scope of data privacy in this country as "yeah, sounds bad, but since it's happening to everyone there's nothing I can do about it"
Most of the previous research on data brokers and national security focuses on data about all U.S. persons, rather than focusing on servicemembers as we do in this report. Research in both categories is described here.
Also, I think of note is that Military personnel are unique in that they are banned from using tiktok, at least right now, as of recently. This research, combined with earlier and future research might be able to determine what kind of effect this ban has on data collection/data brokers.
I also think it is unique in that the US government is the employer of military personnel, so if they take any action related to protecting their employee data from brokers or from selling, maybe this can be a model for all US citizens, or at least for other employers.
I clicked through because I wanted to see whether the data was health info or OPM breach data.