Quote of the Day
The FBI is buying up information that can be used to track people’s movement and location history, Director Kash Patel said during a Senate hearing Wednesday.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has required law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant for getting people’s location data from cell phone providers since 2018, but data brokers offer an alternative avenue by purchasing the information directly.
Alfred Ng
March 18, 2026
FBI is buying data that can be used to track people, Patel says – POLITICO
And with your location information they know things about you even your closest friends do not know. Even if you are couch surfing trying to avoid giving up your location, they know where you live. They know if you were in the vicinity of that January 6th riot. They know if you were scouting the house where four University of Idaho students were murdered. They know you visit the gay bath house a couple times a month when you tell your wife you are working late. They know you are part of the “Underground Railroad” for slaves/wetbacks/Jews/dads-with-child-custody problems.
We live in interesting times.
Surveillance state has been with us for a while. Volume of data points provided some protection unless TPTB were specifically interested in you. AI, of course, eliminates that protection since it has the capacity to crunch infinite volumes of data. Watching John Correia’s self-defense videos, I have been struck by the enormous quantity of surveillance cameras out there. That data can also be crunched. It cuts both ways though. Badge cams have mostly justified police deadly force actions and a recent armed citizen was exonerated when his Meta glasses recorded the event and confirmed his account.
Mass surveillance is sort of a 4A issue but at some point it becomes a 5A issue.
When you cannot do (or not do) anything without the authorities’ knowledge you are (potentially) incriminating yourself 24/7/365, quite possibly without even knowing it. At that point forget about 4A, 5A ceases to become meaningful.
The FBI has collected stuff about people ever since the days of J. Edgar. A friend of mine once got a visit from FBI agents, decades ago. They quizzed her about her connected to suspected Weather Underground members.
It took quite a long time to sort it all out, but it turned out that she came on their radar because she had made an appointment for a massage, and the location for that was a rented office in a building owned by someone suspected of connections with the WU.
She had no idea, of course, but it was quite disconcerted to get questioned like that.
There used to be a military training film for people who worked in SCIFs titled: “You Brought The Bug” to educate people about what a huge security debacle the cell phone was. That was back before smart phones which are a couple of orders of magnitude worse. If you want real privacy stop using a cell phone. Use cash. Drive an older vehicle that doesn’t phone home. Avoid cities and large towns. Use checks instead of credit cards. Basically revert your life, hobbies and shopping practices to pre 1980.
It used to be the case that I could become untrackable by leaving my computer off, my phone at home, and take my car (that still has distributor points and a carburetor) and pay cash for everything.
I suspect it’s harder now, but I’m not exactly sure why. Facial recognition? License plate tracking via traffic camera? I’m pretty sure nobody has shoved a tracking chip in my…..
You don’t really know what your proctologist was up to last time you went to get ‘scoped, do you?
if they don’t get it that way they get it from the gazillion flock cameras being sold to every damn city in the US…
Anyone who thinks the various intelligence services are not going to use that data to find who they can blackmail, then help promote them into positions of elected or appointed power where they can control them, is a fool.
Anyone who doesn’t think that they’d promote underground degenerate lifestyles while publicly distancing themselves, so they can farm / generate and screen deviants who want ever more aggressive “kinks” they can capture covert vids of it that would be embarrassing is also not following the modern version of “honey-trap” methodology. They don’t just wait until they stumble upon such things.
It’s getting so the only reasonable way to return to privacy is to burn it all down (both .gov and .com), and the people who run it along with their cameras and machines, or at least have penalties for mis-use and illegal sale of data that are nearly that extreme.
This also means that a great deal of “unsolved” crime is deliberately unsolved, and they want the perps to keep on going. Gov’t has become nothing more than a large criminal cartel / protection racket, but with retirement bennies.
Citation needed.
Sounds like a non-specific honeypot/blackmail scheme. It’s a known intelligence agency technique, including the CIA’s. It’s also alleged that the CIA and FBI, as part of the deepstate process to co-opt and control those that would control them, especially focus on Congress and appointed Executive branch positions to keep them in line. Mark Judge in particular alleges some attempted honeypot schemes that he didn’t fall for, particularly when he refused to offer up some dirt on Brett Kavanaugh that the WaPo could publish.
If capital-T They aren’t above going it in the specific case, They wouldn’t be adverse to a wholesale operation.
No specific citation.
Informed speculation knowing something about how wicked the intelligence services are and how they operate, along with a basic understanding of game theory and looking at how many of our politicians scandals revolve around sex, along with your own comments about the commonness of sex-parties and how they are always looking for people with the rape-fantasy kink.
Solzhenitsyn should do for a citation.
The surveillance state is indeed a thing, but this:
“The U.S. Supreme Court has required law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant for getting people’s location data from cell phone providers since 2018, but data brokers offer an alternative avenue by purchasing the information directly.”
Leave your cell phone at home, and 90%+ of that specific issue goes away.
Bigger problem: that same data can be purchased BY ANYBODY. For the vast, overwhelming majority of people, that’s a MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger problem.
As Neil Smith pointed out repeatedly, government departments view the Constitution as a collection of pesky rules to get around, rather than as the Supreme Law of the Land that they are required to obey.
It may well be that SCOTUS has issued a ruling mandating warrants. That doesn’t mean that ruling is obeyed. In particular, the history of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI suggests it’s an agency that as a matter of institutional tradition doesn’t care, and instead likes to spy on people and collect blackmail materials. It doesn’t help that the Constitution doesn’t authorize the existence of the FBI in the first place.
It’s getting worse….. and has been for a long time.
Show Us Your ID: How Age Verification Laws Are Reshaping the Internet Forever
https://tinyurl.com/yp3as5b3
Pull quote: “…The UK has officially flipped the switch with a sweeping new law requiring age verification for access to adult and harmful content online. This includes not just porn sites, but also social media platforms, forums, gaming apps, and anywhere that might host content deemed “potentially damaging” to minors.”
In California, the Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) requires operating system providers to collect age information from users and share it with app developers via a real-time API.
Age Attestation on Computing Devices – Colorado General Assembly
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-051
Your Windows 11 Computer’s Hidden Spy: The Dark Truth About TPM Chips
DOJ Says Encryption Is Just For Criminals As It Goes After Another Secure Phone Purveyor
https://tinyurl.com/4bpmj8fy
He Built a Privacy Tool. Now He’s Going to Prison.
There are still limits. Such a massive collection of data could easily require ~1 exabyte per day (why stop at US borders?). And even with AI, someone still has to take an interest in you. Just hide in plain sight and do something worthwhile for yourself.
Chet! You are back! I’ve been wondering about you. 🙂