More light shed on the NSA/AT&T privacy dust-up described in our last post. Business Week is reporting how the telcos get around the illegality of purchasing commercial telecommunications records and not disclosing thier use.
Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting.
Paul Klein and Justin Rood provide a summary of the issue for TPMuckracker.
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