Privacy-Eroding Corruption Is Literally Killing U.S. Troops

I've written for years about how the U.S. is too corrupt to pass a modern privacy law for the internet era. As a result a vast interconnected web of telecoms, app makers, and online service companies now collect and monetize your every movement and online behavior, with zero serious accountability or oversight.

Your phone, browser, apps, watch, and broadband provider all track which sites you visit down to the millisecond. Your smart electricity meter tracks your daily power consumption. Your car tracks not only your driving habits and biometric data, it pulls data off your phone to monetize everything else.

That data is then funneled into a global coalition of dodgy and unregulated data brokers, who sell access to any dipshit with two nickels to rub together. Including governments (foreign and domestic), stalkers, right wing extremists, cops, people pretending to be cops, hackers, and everybody else.

Corporate America and captured politicians created a hyper-surveillance commercial free for all, where protecting the public interest is a distant afterthought. The U.S. government does nothing; in part because Congress is too corrupt to function, in part because it also purchases this data to bypass warrants.

So for the last decade we've just been awash in scandal after scandal, with the costs of our corruption growing higher and higher. Like a few years ago, when it was revealed that right wing activists were buying the location data of abortion clinic visitors, then targeting those vulnerable women with health care disinformation.

Or like last week, when Democratic Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, one of the few politicians who genuinely cares about consumer privacy, warned that foreign countries were using location data purchased on the open market to locate, target and kill U.S. troops.

In a letter to the Pentagon, Wyden warned, not for the first time, that the unregulated adtech and data broker industry constitutes a direct national security threat to the United States:

"Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries ​to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes," the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it was ​time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat."

But it goes way beyond just the "adtech industry." Corruption is a national security threat. The lobotomization of regulators tasked with protecting consumers from corporate power is a national security threat. The hijacking of the courts to ensure corporations can't be held accountable is a national security threat.

The United States has multiple, expansive, overlapping sub-economies dedicated to blowing smoke up the ass of our nationalistic worship of "the troops," but we can't be bothered to take foundational steps to ensure that corporate predation doesn't result in them being deatomized.

Back in 2018 a New York Times story showcased how police and the prison system routinely bought access to cellular phone location data and then failed utterly to secure it. In 2020 the FCC fined AT&T $57 million for collecting wireless customer location data, selling it, and failing to tell consumers about it.

After four years of dysfunction and debate, the FCC finally finalized the planned fines in 2024. But last year, the Trump-stocked 5th Circuit Appeals court threw the whole effort in the toilet and discarded the fines, suddenly insisting the FCC no longer had the authority to do the job it was tasked for.

It's part of a much broader Trump and GOP enabled effort to deliver the final killing blow to regulatory authority and independence, ensuring that U.S. corporations can't be held meaningfully accountable for much of anything, whether environmental, privacy, labor, or public safety abuses.

That the federal government has been completely hollowed out by corruption and no longer functions, something that will result in unfathomable suffering and fatalities for decades to come, generally isn't of interest to the corporate press.

Corporate media ownership approves of this defanging of corporate oversight, so most journalism effectively ignores that this is happening. In fact most journalism you'll read ignores that corruption exists entirely for risk of upsetting sources, event sponsors, right wing subscribers and ad viewers, and management.

For example this Reuters story exploring Wyden's concerns correctly identifies what is happening, but they fall mysteriously short at explaining why.

What's not really in dispute: a massive coalition of app makers, tech companies, marketing companies, banks, telecoms, data brokers, and other industries collectively lobbied the federal government into apathy because making money was more important than public safety and national security.

Reuters doesn't mention this, but they do end the story with a comment from Google, allowing the tech giant to pretend it wasn't part of the problem:

In a statement, Alphabet's Google said that ​Chrome had "industry leading security." The company added that it had "long advocated for stronger rules and safeguards against data brokers."

When companies like Google or Facebook propose "useful" new privacy laws, they're generally privacy laws their lawyers write, so full of loopholes as to be largely useless. Again, "we" decided that making money was more important than consumer privacy or even human lives, and the check has come due.

There's been ample warning. As Wyden notes, this had all been apparent for much of the last decade. In 2024, Wired published a story exploring how easy it was to buy the location data of U.S. servicemembers and spies as they wandered around Germany.

The Congressional response? Bupkis. Corruption gridlock.

When Congress does act on privacy, it's either performative or to protect the extraction class. When it was found that a kid was tracking the publicized movement of oligarch jets in early 2024 to highlight their wasteful environmental abuse, Congress passed a law in a matter of months.

Then you may recall the great three year hyperventilation about TikTok privacy, which culminated in a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers "fixing" the problem by offloading the app to Trump's billionaire friends, who were arguably less ethical on privacy and propaganda than the Chinese-linked company they supplanted.

Every so often we'll get close to passing meaningful privacy safeguards before lobbyists kill the effort. Like in 2016, when the FCC crafted privacy laws protecting broadband consumers, only to have Senate Republicans leverage the Congressional Review Act to kill the rules before they could take effect.

This is not a serious country that cares about its citizens (or troops). It's not a country with a functional press capable of being honest about how badly the entire experiment has been hollowed out by rank corruption. Press coverage of privacy issues almost never acknowledges corruption as the underlying cause.

It's considered unseemly.

But it's not subtle: the U.S. is too corrupt to function. Instead of fixing that problem through meaningful campaign finance and lobbying reform, Republicans, “free market” Libertarians, and many centrist Democrats spend most of their time figuring out new ways to lobotomize our regulators, pre-empt meaningful privacy legislation, normalize corruption, and defang what’s left of corporate oversight.

You know, because we just love free market innovation so much.