Google is trying out a new “Pilot Program” that puts a row of advertisements on the Android TV home screen. XDA Developers was the first to report on the new phenomenon, saying, “We’re currently seeing reports that it has shown up in Sony smart TVs, the Mi Box 3 from Xiaomi, NVIDIA Shield TV, and others.”
The advertising is a “Sponsored Channel” part of the “Android TV Core Services” app that ships with all Android TV devices. A “Channel” in Android TV parlance means an entire row of thumbnails in the UI will be dedicated to “sponsored” content. Google provided XDA Developers with a statement saying that yes, this is on purpose, but for now it’s a “pilot program.”
Android TV is committed to optimizing and personalizing the entertainment experience at home. As we explore new opportunities to engage the user community, we’re running a pilot program to surface sponsored content on the Android TV home screen.
Sony has tersely worded a support page detailing the “Sponsored channel,” too. There’s no mention here of it being a pilot program. Sony’s page, titled “A sponsored channel has suddenly appeared on my TV Home menu,” says, “This change is included in the latest Android TV Launcher app (Home app) update. The purpose is to help you discover new apps and contents for your TV.”
Sony goes on to say, “This channel is managed by Google” and “the Sponsored channel cannot be customized.” Sony basically could replace the entire page with a “Deal with it” sunglasses gif, and it would send the same message.
Buying a product knowing it has ads in it is one thing, but users on Reddit and elsewhere are understandably angry about ads suddenly being patched into their devices—especially in cases when these devices are multi-thousand-dollar 4K Sony televisions. There is an option to disable the ads if you dig into the settings but users are reporting the ads aren’t staying disabled. For now, uninstalling updates for the “Android TV Core Services” app is the best way to remove the ads.
Remember, for now this is a “pilot program.” So please share your valuable feedback with Google in the comments.
Juozas Kaziukenas’ article “Amazon-Owned Brands Far From Successful” is based on a report he set up called “Amazon Private Label Brands“. This report is oddly disjointed, crossing statistics in and out, changing his metrics at random and finally coming out with a conclusion which is totally at variance with the content of the article. It’s impossible to see where the sales statistics come from and thus can’t be verified. Reviews – and unrelated metric – is used as a proxy for sales success where he doesn’t mention actual sales figures. Yet major news outlets, such as Bloomberg (Most Amazon Brands Are Duds, Not Disrupters, Study Finds), Business Insider (Most Amazon private labels aren’t flying off the shelves yet, but the company is taking huge steps to change that) and many more have apparently taken the conclusion of the article at face value, seemingly without reading the article itself and are publishing this piece as some sort of evidence that Amazon’s monopoly position is not a problem.
In his analysis, he starts out saying that the top 10 most
successful private label brands contribute 81% to total sales at a value of
$7.5 billion in 2018. He then arbitrarily removes 7 of these brands and states
the total sales by private label brands at under $1 billion. For any retailer,
this is a huge turnover. Oddly enough, the next figure presented is that total
retail sales generated online by Amazon is $122.9 billion. A quick off the cuff
guestimate puts the top 10 Amazon private label brands at around 7% of total
online retail. Considering Amazon has 23,142 own products, you would assume the
total Amazon slice of the pie would be quite a bit larger than 7%.
Interestingly, Marketplacepulse has a statistics page where Amazon international marketplace sales are shown to be a staggering $15.55 billion in Q3 2018 alone and North American sales pegged at $34,35 billion in the same quarter. Focussing on the top 10 brands seems again to be wilfully missing a huge amount of online retail revenue on marketplaces owned by Amazon.
Search is then stated to be the primary driver of purchases
and some time is spent looking at click through rates. How he got these figures
is up in the air, but could it be that they were provided by Amazon? Is it
possible that Amazon is, in fact, funding this analysis? While mr Kaziukenas at
some point does mention the related products feature and he does briefly
demonstrate its importance in product visibility, search results for specific
terms are the metric he goes for here.
The study then quickly and embarrassingly shows that in the
lower end of the price spectrum, price is a driving factor. This will return in
the study when it is shown that products like batteries are indeed stealing
customers from other manufacturers.
Product reviews are used as a rating factor for product
success in the study. Reviews are an unrelated metric and the article notes that
where batteries and cables are concerned, Amazon owns the market share even
with a below average rating. Unfortunately, turnover, or any financial metric,
is no longer used to measure product success once the study has passed the
opening paragraphs.
A lot of time is spent on a few randomly selected products,
which are neither cheaper nor better than the competition. He manages to quite
unsurprisingly demonstrate that more expensive, lower quality Amazon products
don’t do quite as well as cheaper, better quality non-Amazon alternative products.
A 6-foot-long HDMI cable is used as an example to prove that cheaper Amazon
products do better than the competition: “AmazonBasics 6 feet HDMI cable sells
for $6.99 and is the number one best-seller HDMI cable on Amazon” (again, how
he knows what the number one best-seller is, is a mystery to me).
Continuing on, the study shows that Amazon does copy products
and the contradictory statements start flying fast and hard. First the quote is given: “In July, a similar
stand appeared at about half the price. The brand: AmazonBasics. Since then,
sales of the Rain Design original have slipped.” followed by the statement:
“Today Rain Design’s laptop stand sells for $39.99 and seems to be outselling
Amazon’s $19.99 copy.” I assume that the “seems to be outselling” part of this
statement is based entirely on the review status and not on any actual sales
data. Next the study claims that this product copying is “rare” and goes on to
state “There is no basis to assume that copying products is part of the Amazon
strategy.” This doesn’t ring very true next to the two examples on display –
and surely many more examples can easily be found. Mr Kaziukenas states: “The
story of Rain Design’s laptop stand is scary but doesn’t happen often.” Again I
would like to see where the metrics being used here come from and the
definition of “often”. It’s stated as though he has actual data on this, but
chooses not to share this. I somehow doubt that Amazon would be happy to
provide him with this data.
Now the study continues to say that having data on the
competition is not useful, but specifies this as a vague “ability to utilize
that data for brand building” and then states that because Amazon isn’t the
first choice in the upper price market, or established brand space, it’s not
utilising this data very well. He then goes on to state that where brand is not
important (the cheap product space, eg. batteries) they are the number one
seller. Let us not forget that this failed brand building of products in the
space beyond the top three products (as arbitrarily chosen by this study in the
beginning) is netting sales of around $6.5 billion!
Now comes a pretty bizarre part where an argument is put
forward that if you use the search by specifying a brand name before the
generic product name, Amazon products are not given an advantage, despite being
shown in the related items. Even though if you put in a generic product name,
Amazon products will come forward and fill the screen, unless you have a
sponsored the search term, as demonstrated by a page full of cheaper Amazon
HDMI cables. This is somehow used as an argument that there is no advantage in
Organic Search Results, an arbitrarily and very narrowly chosen term which has
no relation to the part of the article in which at every turn it is clearly
shown that Amazon uses their advantage to push their products. Totally beside
the wayside is the fact that different people are shown different search
results, depending on a huge multitude of factors. What Mr Kaziukenas sees as
results are not going to be the same as other shoppers on the platform,
although he gives his search results as being that one single truth.
The conclusion of the piece states that Amazon’s private
brand business (ie, those not labelled with the word “Amazon” in it) don’t do
very well. The generic goods business (ie, those where potential customers have
no reason to look specifically for a brand name) is cast aside. Somehow the
final thought is that Amazon therefore doesn’t want to be in the physical
products business. The sheer scale of the sales numbers presented in the
article, however, belie this statement. Amazon is making billions of dollars in
the physical goods segment and is using its position to push out competitors –
to make no mention of the magic arbitration system of goods and fraud on the
market place, the conflict of interest in being both a marketplace and a salesman
in that marketplace: but that’s another story, covered by other articles.
8/4/19 EDIT:
If it feels like your Amazon search results have been overwhelmed with promotions for their private-label brands, like Amazon Basics, Mama Bear or Daily Ritual, that may be changing. As lawmakers pay more attention to the most powerful tech companies, Amazon has begun quietly removing some of the more obvious promotions, including banner ads, for its private-label products, reports CNBC, which spoke to Amazon sellers and consultants.
Amazon’s aggressive marketing of its own private brands, with ads that often appear in search results above listings for competing items from third-party sellers, have raised antitrust concerns.
While
Amazon benefits from higher margins, cost-savings from a more efficient
supply chain and new data, third-party sellers often suffer. For
example, they may have to cut prices to stay competitive, and even lower
prices may not be enough to attract customers away from Amazon’s
promotions for its own items, which show up in many search results.
The US firm Aireon says its new satellite surveillance network is now fully live and being trialled over the North Atlantic.
The system employs a constellation of 66 spacecraft, which monitor the situational messages pumped out by aircraft transponders.
These report a plane’s position, altitude, direction and speed every eight seconds.
The two big navigation management companies that marshal plane movements across the North Atlantic – UK Nats and Nav Canada – intend to use Aireon to transform their operations.
[…]
ncreasing numbers of planes since the early 2000s have been fitted with Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) transponders. US and European regulators have mandated all aircraft carry this equipment as of next year.
ADS-B pushes out a bundle of information about an aircraft – from its identity to a GPS-determined altitude and ground speed. ADS-B was introduced to enhance surveillance and safety over land, but the messages can also be picked up by satellites.
Aireon has receivers riding piggyback on all 66 spacecraft of the Iridium sat-phone service provider. These sensors make it possible now to track planes even out over the ocean, beyond the visibility of radar – and ocean waters cover 70% of the globe
[…]
in the North Atlantic, traditional in-line safe separation distances will eventually be reduced from 40 nautical miles (80km) down to as little as 14 nautical miles (25km). As a result, more aircraft will be able to use the most efficient tracks.
[…]
“Eight out of 10 flights will now be able to fly without any kind of speed restriction compared with the far less efficient fixed-speed environment we previously had to operate within,” Mr Rolfe said. “These changes, made possible by Aireon, will generate net savings of $300 in fuel and two tonnes of carbon dioxide per flight.”
However, any carbon dividend is likely to be eaten into by the growth in traffic made possible by the introduction space-based ADS-B. Today, there are over 500,000 aircraft movements across the North Atlantic each year. This is projected to increase to 800,000 by 2030.
Of course the US can look in, under CLOUD rules, because Google is an American company. The move of the files has been done without consent from the patients by Medical Research Data Management, a commercial company, because (they say), the hospitals have given permission. Also, hospitals don’t need to ask for patient permission, because patients have given hospitals permission through accepting the electronic patient filing system.
Another concern is the pseudo-anonymisation of the data. For a company like Google, it’s won’t be particularly hard to match the data to real people.
Researchers at the cybersecurity firm UpGuard on Wednesday said they had discovered the existence of two datasets together containing the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users. Both were left publicly accessible.
In a blog post, UpGuard connected one of the leaky databases to a Mexico-based media company called Cultura Colectiva. The data set reportedly contains over 146 GB of data, which amounts to over 540 million Facebook user records, including comments, likes, reactions, account names, Facebook user IDs, and more.
A second leak, UpGuard said, was connected to a Facebook-integrated app called “At the pool” and had exposed roughly 22,000 passwords. “The passwords are presumably for the ‘At the Pool’ app rather than for the user’s Facebook account, but would put users at risk who have reused the same password across accounts,” the firm said. The database also contained data on users’ friends, likes, groups, and locations where they had checked in, said UpGuard.
Both datasets were stored in unsecured Amazon S3 buckets and could be accessed by virtually anyone. Neither was password protected. The buckets have since been secured or taken offline.
Apache HTTP Server has been given a patch to address a potentially serious elevation of privilege vulnerability.
Designated CVE-2019-0211, the flaw allows a “worker” process to change its privileges when the host server resets itself, potentially allowing anyone with a local account to run commands with root clearance, essentially giving them complete control over the targeted machine.
The bug was discovered by researcher Charles Fol of security shop Ambionics, who privately reported the issue to Apache. Admins can get the vulnerability sealed up by making sure their servers are updated to version 2.4.39 or later.
While elevation of privilege vulnerabilities are not generally considered particularly serious bugs (after all, you need to already be running code on the target machine, which is in and of itself a security compromise), the nature of Apache Server HTTP as a host machine means that this bug will almost always be exposed to some extent.
Fol told The Register that as HTTP servers are used for web hosting, multiple users will be given guest accounts on each machine. In the wild, this means the attacker could simply sign up for an account to have their site hosted on the target server.
“The web hoster has total access to the server through the ‘root’ account,” Fol explained.
“If one of the users successfully exploits the vulnerability I reported, he/she will get full access to the server, just like the web hoster. This implies read/write/delete any file/database of the other clients.”
I have been a bit critical of Linux Mint in the past, but the truth is, it is a great distribution that many people enjoy. While Mint is not my favorite desktop distro (that would be Fedora), I recognize its quality. Is it perfect? No, there is no such thing as a flawless Linux-based operating system.
Today should be happy times for the Linux Mint community, as we finally learn some new details about the upcoming version 19.2! It will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 and once again feature three desktop environments — Xfce, Mate, and Cinnamon. We even found out the code name for Linux Mint 19.2 — “Tina.” And yet, it is hard to celebrate. Why? Because the developers seem to be depressed and defeated. They even appear to be a bit disenchanted with Free Software development overall.
Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, shared a very lengthy blog post today, and it really made me sad.
[…]
I can show them 500 people donated money last month, I can forward emails to the team where people tell me how much they love Linux Mint, I can tell them they’re making a difference but there’s nothing like interacting directly with a happy user, seeing first-hand somebody be delighted with what you worked on. How our community interacts with our developers is key, to their work, to their happiness and to their motivation.
Clem quite literally says he is not enjoying the Linux Mint development nowadays, which really breaks my heart.
[…]
I also have a life outside open source work, too. It’s not mentally sound to put the hours I’ve put into the compositor. I was only able to do what I could because I was unemployed in January. Now I’m working a job full time, and trying to keep up with bug fixes. I’ve been spending every night and weekend, basically every spare moment of my free time trying to fix things.
[…]
To make things even worse, Hicks is apparently embarrassed by the official Linux Mint blog post! Another Reddit member named tuxkrusader responds to Hicks by saying “I’m slightly concerned that you’re not a member of the linuxmint group on github anymore. I hope you’re not on bad terms with the project.” Hicks shockingly responds by saying “Nope, I hid my project affiliation because that blog post makes me look bad.”
Wow. Hiding his affiliation with the Linux Mint project on GitHub? It seems things may be worse than I originally thought…
Facebook has been prompting some users registering for the first time to hand over the passwords to their email accounts, the Daily Beast reported on Tuesday—a practice that blares right past questionable and into “beyond sketchy” territory, security consultant Jake Williams told the Beast.
A Twitter account using the handle @originalesushi first posted an image of the screen several days ago, in which new users are told they can confirm their third-party email addresses “automatically” by giving Facebook their login credentials. The Beast wrote that the prompt appeared to trigger under circumstances where Facebook might think a sign-up attempt is “suspicious,” and confirmed it on their end by “using a disposable webmail address and connecting through a VPN in Romania.”
It is never, ever advisable for a user to give out their email password to anyone, except possibly to a 100 percent verified account administrator when no other option exists (which there should be). Email accounts tend to be primary gateways into the rest of the web, because a valid one is usually necessary to register accounts on everything from banks and financial institutions to social media accounts and porn sites. They obviously also contain copies of every un-deleted message ever sent to or from that address, as well as additional information like contact lists. It is for this reason that email password requests are one of the most obvious hallmarks of a phishing scam.
“That’s beyond sketchy,” Williams told the Beast. “They should not be taking your password or handling your password in the background. If that’s what’s required to sign up with Facebook, you’re better off not being on Facebook.”
“This is basically indistinguishable to a phishing attack,” Electronic Frontier Foundation security researcher Bennett Cyphers told Business Insider. “This is bad on so many levels. It’s an absurd overreach by Facebook and a sleazy attempt to trick people to upload data about their contacts to Facebook as the price of signing up… No company should ever be asking people for credentials like this, and you shouldn’t trust anyone that does.”
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Gizmodo that this screen appears for some users signing up for the first time, though the company wrote, “These passwords are not stored by Facebook.” It additionally characterized the number of users it asks for email passwords as “very small.” Those presented with the screen were signing up on desktop while using email addresses that did not support OAuth—an open standard for allowing third parties authenticated access to assets (such as for the purpose of verifying identities) without sharing login credentials. OAuth is typically a standard feature of major email providers.
Facebook noted in the statement that those users presented with this screen could opt out of sharing passwords and use another verification method such as email or phone. The company also said it would be ending the practice of asking for email passwords.
According to a letter obtained by Variety, the chief of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim, wrote to AMPAS CEO Dawn Hudson on March 21 to express concerns that new rules would be written “in a way that tends to suppress competition.”
“In the event that the Academy — an association that includes multiple competitors in its membership — establishes certain eligibility requirements for the Oscars that eliminate competition without procompetitive justification, such conduct may raise antitrust concerns,” Delrahim wrote.
The letter came in response to reports that Steven Spielberg, an Academy board member, was planning to push for rules changes to Oscars eligibility, restricting movies that debut on Netflix and other streaming services around the same time that they show in theaters. Netflix made a big splash at the Oscars this year, as the movie “Roma” won best director, best foreign language film and best cinematography.
[…]
Spielberg’s concerns over the eligibility of movies on streaming platforms have triggered intense debate in the industry. Netflix responded on Twitter early last month with the statement, “We love cinema. Here are some things we also love. Access for people who can’t always afford, or live in towns without, theaters. Letting everyone, everywhere enjoy releases at the same time. Giving filmmakers more ways to share art. These things are not mutually exclusive.”
Spielberg told ITV News last year that Netflix and other streaming platforms have boosted the quality of television, but “once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie. … If it’s a good show—deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar.”
India launched a missile at a satellite believed to be the Indian spy satellite Microsat-r, launched a few months ago. The blowup created a field of satellite debris at that altitude. That debris is a problem because it sits at the same altitude as the ISS. In a worst-case scenario, some of that debris could impact the station creating a Gravity-esque scenario. Some of those pieces are too small for NASA to track, meaning we’ll have no way of predicting an impact beforehand.
“What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track — we’re talking about 10 cm (4 inches) or bigger —about 60 pieces have been tracked,” Bridenstine said in an announcement on Monday.
India deliberately targeted a satellite that orbited at a lower altitude than the ISS to prevent this sort of situation, but some of the debris appears to have reached higher. Of those 60 debris objects tracked by NASA, Bridenstine says 24 of them are at the same altitude as the ISS or higher.
The nature of low Earth orbit means that even debris pieces residing above the ISS could still pose a threat. Satellites and debris are gradually slowed by the very thin atmosphere that resides there. The ISS, for instance, routinely has to fire its boosters to increase its altitude to counteract atmospheric drag.
Those small debris pieces will lose altitude over time and eventually burn up in the atmosphere, but the high-altitude debris will have to come in range of the ISS before that happens. That means an impact could happen even a few months from now as high-altitude debris continues to fall.
The head of the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Jim Bridenstine, on Tuesday branded India’s destruction of one of its satellites a “terrible thing” that had created 400 pieces of orbital debris and led to new dangers for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Mr. Bridenstine was addressing employees of the NASA five days after India shot down a low-orbiting satellite in a missile test to prove it was among the world’s advanced space powers.
Not all of the pieces were big enough to track, Mr. Bridenstine explained. “What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track — we’re talking about 10 cm [six inches] or bigger — about 60 pieces have been tracked.”
The Indian satellite was destroyed at a relatively low altitude of 300 km, well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit.
But 24 of the pieces “are going above the apogee of the ISS,” said Mr. Bridenstine.
“That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight. It’s unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is,” he said.
But the risk will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere.
The U.S. military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk of the ISS and satellites.
They are currently tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10 cm.
Chinese test created 3,000 debris
That includes about 10,000 pieces of space debris, of which nearly 3,000 were created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007 at 530 miles from the surface.
As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44 percent over 10 days, Mr. Bridenstine said.
Soon after the ASAT test, India said it was done in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris. “Whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back onto the earth within weeks.”
By conducting the test, the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi said, India was not in violation of any international law or treaty to which it is a party to or any national obligation.
Interestingly, Bridenstine is the first top official from the Trump administration to come out in public against the India’s ASAT test.
A day after India successfully carried out its ASAT test, acting US defence secretary Patrick Shanahan warned that the event could create a “mess” in space but said Washington was still studying the impact.
Bridenstine said the NASA is “learning more and more every hour” that goes by about this orbital debris field that has been created from the anti-satellite test.
“Where we were last week with an assessment that comes from NASA experts as well as the Joint Space Operations Center (part of US Strategic Command).. is that the risk to the International Space Station has increased by 44 per cent,” Bridenstine said.
“We are charged with commercialising of low earth orbit. We are charged with enabling more activities in space than we’ve ever seen before for the purpose of benefiting the human condition, whether it’s pharmaceuticals or printing human organs in 3D to save lives here on earth or manufacturing capabilities in space that you’re not able to do in a gravity well,” he said.
“All of those are placed at risk when these kinds of events happen,” Bridenstine said as he feared India’s ASAT test could risk proliferation of such activities by other countries.
“When one country does it, other countries feel like they have to do it as well,” he said.
“It’s unacceptable. The NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is,” he said.
Risk gone up 44% over 10 days
The risk from small debris as a result of the ASAT test to the ISS went up 44 per cent over a period of 10 days. “So, the good thing is it’s low enough in earth orbit that over time this will all dissipate,” he told his NASA colleagues.
The ISS is a habitable artificial satellite, orbiting the Earth at an altitude between 330 and 435 km. It is a joint project between space agencies of US, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada, and serves as a research laboratory for scientists to conduct space experiments.
As many as 236 astronauts from 18 countries have visited the space station, many of them multiple times, since November 2000.
Bridenstine said a lot of debris from the 2007 direct ascent anti-satellite test by China is still in the space.
“And we’re still dealing with it. We are still, we as a nation are responsible for doing space situational awareness and space traffic management, conjunction analysis for the entire world,” the NASA chief said.
“The International Space Station is still safe. If we need to manoeuvre it, we will. The probability of that I think is low. But at the end of the day we have to be clear also that these activities are not sustainable or compatible with human spaceflight,” he said.
A group of American hackers who once worked for U.S. intelligence agencies helped the United Arab Emirates spy on a BBC host, the chairman of Al Jazeera and other prominent Arab media figures during a tense 2017 confrontation pitting the UAE and its allies against the Gulf state of Qatar.
The American operatives worked for Project Raven, a secret Emirati intelligence program that spied on dissidents, militants and political opponents of the UAE monarchy. A Reuters investigation in January revealed Project Raven’s existence and inner workings, including the fact that it surveilled a British activist and several unnamed U.S. journalists.
The Raven operatives — who included at least nine former employees of the U.S. National Security Agency and the U.S. military — found themselves thrust into the thick of a high-stakes dispute among America’s Gulf allies. The Americans’ role in the UAE-Qatar imbroglio highlights how former U.S. intelligence officials have become key players in the cyber wars of other nations, with little oversight from Washington.
[…]
Dana Shell Smith, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, said she found it alarming that American intelligence veterans were able to work for another government in targeting an American ally. She said Washington should better supervise U.S. government-trained hackers after they leave the intelligence community.
“Folks with these skill sets should not be able to knowingly or unknowingly undermine U.S. interests or contradict U.S. values,” Smith told Reuters.
Wait, so once you are trained for something by the US government, basically you have entered into an enslaved indenture? You may only work for who the US decides you may work for ever after? Or… what, they assassinate you?
WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration secretly collected data in bulk about Americans’ purchases of money-counting machines — and took steps to hide the effort from defendants and courts — before quietly shuttering the program in 2013 amid the uproar over the disclosures by the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, an inspector general report found.
Seeking leads about who might be a drug trafficker, the D.E.A. started in 2008 to issue blanket administrative subpoenas to vendors to learn who was buying money counters. The subpoenas involved no court oversight and were not pegged to any particular investigation. The agency collected tens of thousands of records showing the names and addresses of people who bought the devices.
The public version of the report, which portrayed the program as legally questionable, blacked out the device whose purchase the D.E.A. had tracked. But in a slip-up, the report contained one uncensored reference in a section about how D.E.A. policy called for withholding from official case files the fact that agents first learned the names of suspects from its database of its money-counter purchases.
[…]
The report cited field offices’ complaints that the program had wasted time with a high volume of low-quality leads, resulting in agents scrutinizing people “without any connection to illicit activity.” But the D.E.A. eventually refined its analysis to produce fewer but higher-quality leads, and the D.E.A. said it had led to arrests and seizures of drugs, guns, cars and illicit cash.
The idea for the nationwide program originated in a D.E.A. operation in Chicago, when a subpoena for three months of purchase records from a local store led to two arrests and “significant seizures of drugs and related proceeds,” it said.
But Sarah St. Vincent, a Human Rights Watch researcher who flagged the slip-up on Twitter, argued that it was an abuse to suck Americans’ names into a database that would be analyzed to identify criminal suspects, based solely upon their purchase of a lawful product.
[…]
In the spring of 2013, the report said, the D.E.A. submitted its database to a joint operations hub where law enforcement agencies working together on organized crime and drug enforcement could mine it. But F.B.I. agents questioned whether the data had been lawfully acquired, and the bureau banned its officials from gaining access to it.
The F.B.I. agents “explained that running all of these names, which had been collected without foundation, through a massive government database and producing comprehensive intelligence products on any ‘hits,’ which included detailed information on family members and pictures, ‘didn’t sit right,’” the report said.
