PREVIEW - The Friday Edition: What does the government actually know about you?

Summary

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Tangle Podcast Summary

Episode: PREVIEW – The Friday Edition: What does the government actually know about you?

Host: Isaac Saul
Date: September 5, 2025

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Overview

This special episode of the Tangle podcast investigates a provocative question: What does the government actually know about you? Prompted by team member Russell Nystrom and explored collaboratively with editors Lindsay Knuth and Audrey Moorhead, the episode aims to unearth the extent, methods, and implications of government data collection in America. Drawing on investigative examples, expert interviews, and legal context, the Tangle team provides an eye-opening look at both the voluntary and covert ways our personal information ends up in government databases and what that means for privacy, security, and public policy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Does the Government Get Your Data? (03:11–07:00)

• Voluntary Disclosure: Most people expect the government to know essentials such as Social Security numbers, birth certificates, and data supplied for services like taxes or loans.
  • "Every US citizen born since 1933 has had a birth certificate issued by their state government, and since 1946 all live births have been tracked federally by the National Vital Statistics System."
    — Narrator/Reporter (04:49)
• Biometric Data Collection:
  • Biometric data (fingerprints, facial recognition) is increasingly gathered at ports of entry, during law enforcement interactions, and for government programs like TSA Precheck.
  • While often implicitly consented to (e.g., by traversing airport security), sometimes it’s a requirement for benefits or entry.
• Inter-Agency Data Friction:
  • The Privacy Act of 1974 generally forbids sharing of personal data between agencies, barring certain exceptions (like criminal investigations). This creates protective "friction," but can slow government efficiency.

“Internet law specialist and Electric Frontier Foundation executive director Cindy Cohn said this friction in the data sharing process can prevent misuse and protect the privacy of Americans’ data. But this friction comes at the expense of government efficiency.”
— Narrator/Reporter (10:32)

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2. Unseen and Indirect Government Data Collection (12:28–15:30)

• Web Scraping and Data Brokers:
  • Agencies use automated bots, crawlers, and spiders to harvest public website and social media data.
  • More concerning is the practice of buying data from commercial brokers. Personal info, sometimes supposedly anonymized, can often be easily re-identified.
• Scale of Industry:
  • The global data broker market reached nearly $300 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow significantly.
• Law Enforcement Use and Failure of Anonymization:
  • By obtaining data from devices or brokers, law enforcement can reconstruct not only digital but physical movements with high precision.

“Even if I was just an anonymized number, my behavior was as unique as a fingerprint… There’s no way to anonymize my identity in a dataset like geolocation.”
— Journalist Byron Tao (13:50)

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3. Legal Rights and Remaining Gaps (15:30–18:43)

• Legal Framework:
  • The Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment provide some protections; notably, certain Supreme Court cases have extended these to digital data.
  • Loopholes remain—especially around the purchase of commercial data without oversight.
• Recent and Proposed Legislation:
  • The “Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act” would attempt to close the loophole enabling government purchase of personal data from brokers without warrants—passed in the House, pending in the Senate.

“Everybody has a reason to be concerned about surveillance… If people take away from this that there are not enough legal protections for our data, that is the correct takeaway.”
— Jennifer Granik, ACLU Cybersecurity Lawyer (18:20)

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4. Why Does the Government Want/Need All This Data? (19:45–26:05)

• Ambivalence and Benefits:
  • Many Americans are unaware or indifferent to government data capture, especially when streamlining services is cited as a benefit.
  • Enhanced data sharing could reduce inefficiency and improve access, such as enrolling more eligible citizens in public benefits.
• Combating Fraud:
  • Government waste (e.g., misdirected payments) often results from data silos or lack of cross-checks. Inter-agency sharing can mitigate multi-billion dollar errors.
• Security & Crisis Response:
  • Post-9/11, government and private entities recognized better “connecting the dots” could prevent terrorism.
  • Laws like the Patriot Act and FISA 702 were enacted to allow better intelligence sharing—sometimes ensnaring Americans incidentally.
  • During emergencies (e.g., COVID-19), the need for speed led to loosened cross-checks, resulting in improper payments but also faster aid distribution.

“Their failure to prevent the tragedy [9/11] was a failure to connect the dots…”
— Byron Tao, referencing Means of Control (22:15)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Limits of Anonymization:

  “Even if I was just an anonymized number, my behavior was as unique as a fingerprint… There’s no way to anonymize my identity in a dataset like geolocation.”
  — Byron Tao, Journalist (13:50)

• On Legal Protections:

  “Everybody has a reason to be concerned about surveillance… If people take away from this that there are not enough legal protections for our data, that is the correct takeaway.”
  — Jennifer Granik, ACLU Cybersecurity Lawyer (18:20)

• On Government Efficiency vs. Privacy:

  “This friction in the data sharing process can prevent misuse and protect the privacy of Americans’ data. But this friction comes at the expense of government efficiency.”
  — Cindy Cohn, Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation (10:32)

• On Security Justifications:

  “Their failure to prevent the tragedy [9/11] was a failure to connect the dots, and a missed opportunity to capitalize on the disparate threads of data…”
  — Byron Tao (22:15)

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Important Timestamps

• [03:11] Introduction of the main question and investigative context by Isaac Saul
• [04:14] Deep dive into examples of government data collection (e.g., Measurement Systems case, ICE data purchases)
• [07:00–12:28] Overview of personal data government collects with/without consent
• [12:37] Detailed explanation of hidden data acquisition (scraping, data brokers)
• [15:30] Legal landscape and gaps in protections, plus recent legislative attempts to address those gaps
• [19:45] Discussion of why the government undertakes such extensive data collection and sharing
• [22:00+] Discussion of security, fraud, and emergency policy justifications

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Final Takeaways

• The government’s knowledge of its citizens is both broader and deeper than most realize, due to a combination of voluntary disclosures, surreptitious data acquisition, and purchases from commercial data brokers.
• Legal protections lag behind technological change, leaving Americans with real, but limited, control over their data privacy.
• There is an ongoing tension between safeguarding privacy and improving government efficiency, public safety, and crisis response. Many experts argue that existing laws do not sufficiently protect citizen privacy in the digital era.

For listeners, the message is clear: If you’re concerned about government surveillance and your personal data, you’re right to be.

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Transcript

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[Narrator/Reporter (possibly Lindsay Knuth or Russell Nystrom)]

From executive Producer Isaac.

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Saul this is Tangle.

[Isaac Saul, Host of Tangle Podcast]

Hey guys, and welcome to a special episode of the Tangle Podcast. I am Isaac Saul. A few weeks ago, a Tangle staff member named Russell Nystrom brought up a question to me in a team meeting. He said, what does the government know about you? How much? How little? Where do they get the information and what possibly could they do with it? It's an evocative question, and the truth was I only had a rough idea of the answer. Russell wanted to explore it for a story and I encouraged him to do so. And then he enlisted the help from two editors on our team, Lindsay Knuth and Audrey Moorhead. Today I'm proud to share the piece that came out of Russell's question, which offers a series of eye opening and thought provoking answers to jump into the story. I'm going to pass the mic over to Audrey Moorhead, one of our editors, who's going to give you some background on what exactly we're talking about.

[Narrator/Reporter (possibly Lindsay Knuth or Russell Nystrom)]

In 2022, two university researchers set out on a routine search for security vulnerabilities in Android apps when they stumbled across a strange line of code. It was malware collecting location data on users regardless of the permission they granted it, allowing whomever had access to the data the ability to map out relationships between people, places and devices. The discovery kicked off an investigation that traced the personal data of millions of users of common apps like Muslim prayer apps and QR code scanners to a Panamanian data harvesting company called Measurement Systems. Looking deeper, the researchers found one more strange connection. The Panamanian malware company collecting the data shared an Internet domain with another business, a Virginia defense contractor specializing in US Cyber intelligence operations. Later that year, a report from the Georgetown Law center on Privacy and Technology revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was sidestepping subpoena requirements and buying up large swaths of of Americans utility records, according to report co author Nina Wang. The data, which included license plates, property records and employment records, captured a 360 degree view of the lives of almost every American. While both cases prompted some immediate action, Google banned the apps that stored the offending code, and major utility companies agreed to stop sharing data with ICE incidents like these persist, and they're emblematic of two intrusive and legally questionable methods of gathering information on citizens. Number one, the government use of surveillance technologies to passively drag the Internet. And number two, the government purchase of massive amounts of data through commercial data brokers. That got us thinking what else does the government know about us? We spoke to several experts in data collection, privacy, and government practices to learn all the information we expect the government to know, as well as what we don't expect our federal agencies to learn. Today, TANGO staffer Russell Nistrom will also share his thoughts on the government's most recent data collection practices and what they pretend for the future. But first, let's talk a little bit about what you tell the government about yourself. You probably expect the government to know some things about you, like your driver's license and Social Security numbers. This is personally identifying information that the government has provided for you and that you've probably entered into countless forms. You also might expect certain agencies like the Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Education to have access to your employment data or student loan records, since you volunteered that information yourself to take advantage of those offices services. Upon reflection, you might even realize the government knows quite a lot about you. Every US citizen born since 1933 has had a birth certificate issued by their state government, and since 1946 all live births have been tracked federally by the National Vital Statistics System. While each state issues its own unique birth certificates, the federal government requires some basic information to be recorded for statistical purposes, including the location of the birth, the baby's sex, and, of course, the baby's full legal name. Additionally, each US Citizen is given a Social Security number that is permanently tied to their personal identity in federal databases. When you go through a major life event like marriage, you give your updated personal information to your state government, which is required to submit statistical information on marriages and deaths to the nvss. The government also collects biometric data on US Citizens or non citizens through means that require less explicit forms of consent. This data is collected at ports of entry in airports or whenever someone is apprehended or applying for government documents. The government doesn't explicitly ask permission to collect the data, but we effectively consent to it by, say, navigating a security checkpoint at an airport. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, requires individuals who want to opt into its TSA Precheck program to provide biometric data, and the agency recently implemented a facial recognition program at security checkpoints within 250 airports, which travelers can opt out of, though federal reports suggest opt outs are rare, mostly because travelers know they have this option or don't want to slow the security process down. The most notable biometric data collection program is the Automated Biometric Identification System, or ident, run by the Office of Biometric Identity Management within the Department of Homeland Security, which collects the biometric data of individuals crossing the U.S. border without explicitly asking for consent to the collection. Additionally, the U.S. citizenship and Immigration Services office collects biometric data on asylum seekers already in the U.S. in this case, though, asylum seekers consent to the data collection as a condition to continue their asylum application. Additionally, government programs like Medicare and Medicaid maintain databases of citizens insurance and medical needs, while the IRS keeps tax records, including employment information, SSNs, and addresses in its databases. The government's collection methods range from innocuous to intrusive, with no clear set of laws governing citizen data privacy. However, federal agencies are explicitly barred from sharing personal data with each other by the Privacy act of 1974, with exceptions for special circumstances like criminal investigations. Additionally, the Privacy act requires government agencies that collect large systems of records to declare what records they keep and allow citizens to request and amend that data. While the government discloses a lot of the data it collects on American citizens, there are still some areas where we can't be sure exactly what is known. For example, the operations of the National Security Agency are still largely secretive, even after the efforts of former defense contractor Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers. That said, the federal government is not a monolith. Our data spans the physical and digital spaces of over 400 federal agencies, departments and sub agencies, not to mention the mountains of records held at the state and local levels. Each federal agency is its own data aggregating entity, often with its own strict regulations on how that data can be shared across agencies. Naturally, this creates some friction in the system. For example, the NSA can't access IRS data except in cases of active criminal investigations. Internet law specialist and Electric Frontier foundation executive Director Cindy Cohn said this friction in the data sharing process can prevent, misuse and protect the privacy of Americans data. But this friction comes at the expense of government efficiency, and these concerns about efficiency have led the Trump administration to seek to reduce some of this friction with new efforts to increase data sharing. In short, this means the information you give the TSA through Precheck might become readily available to the NSA with or without a criminal investigation.

[Isaac Saul, Host of Tangle Podcast]

We'll be right back after this quick break.

[John Law, Executive Producer of Tangle]

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[Narrator/Reporter (possibly Lindsay Knuth or Russell Nystrom)]

Now let's go to Associate Editor Lindsay Knuth for what the government learns about you.

[Narrator/Expert (possibly Jennifer Granik or Byron Tao)]

We give a lot of data to the government voluntarily, but much of it is taken, either scraped from the Internet or bought without our knowledge or consent. Using programs called bots, crawlers and spiders, the government regularly collects website visitor data like IP addresses, discerns Internet usage patterns, and monitors social media platforms according to the General Service Administration guidelines on the GSA website. For government agencies engaged in scraping include ensuring your scraping bot is transparent about who you are and why you're scraping data, and considering scraping during off peak hours to avoid overloading servers. The federal government is also increasingly purchasing consumer data from private companies. According to a 2024 Grandview Research report, governments around the world are the biggest consumers of data, overtaking even statistically int industries like banking, financial services, insurance, and healthcare. Through buying private records like personal communications or cell phone data, the government ends up with a large amount of information about you that you never consented to give, like your work, email address, college major, or the name of your primary physician. Accenture, Equifax, Experian, and Thomson Reuters are just a few of the many private companies that collect raw data from all over public records, cookies, IP tracking, other commercial data brokers, and aggregate it into large and customized sets. By all measures, the global industry of commercial data brokering is booming. The data broker market size was almost $300 billion in 2024, and it's projected to grow by 7.3% annually for the next eight years. These data sets, whether they're available for purchase or not, are often anonymized, but as journalist Byron Tao explained in his 20 means of control, the pieces can easily be connected to reidentify their source. Even if I was just an anonymized number, my behavior was as unique as a fingerprint. Even in a sea of hundreds of millions of others, tao writes. There's no way to anonymize my identity in a data set like geolocation. This failure of anonymization poses unique benefits for parts of the government concerned with law enforcement and national security. Think the nsa, dhs, the FBI, the CIA, and police departments around the country. All of these places are free to collect biometric data when conducting criminal investigations or preventing border violations. As one Maryland state trooper explained, picture getting a suspect's phone. Then in the extraction of data, being able to see every place they'd been in the last 18 months plotted on a map, you filter by date ranges. The success, he said, lies in the secrecy. With all the avenues that exist to gather information about us, we wanted to learn more about what the government is legally constrained from knowing. For that, we spoke with American Civil Liberties Union cybersecurity lawyer Jennifer Granik, whose seminal work in the space led Senator Ron Wyden to call her the NBA All Star of Surveillance law. Granik explains that the government considers not just our online but our offline behaviors to be fair game because, quote, anyone can see it as the government doesn't consider what we do outside to be private. Federal agencies collect information about us through a surveillance network of cameras and drones. As of 2018, China, which we often consider to be the poster child for mass surveillance, operated an estimated 349 million cameras. That's one camera for every four Chinese citizens, while the US had roughly 70 million. That's one for every 4.6American citizens. Though the US's sprawling network has plenty of detractors, its benefits for public safety are often emphasized by law enforcement. Just take late last year, when the national circulation of a few images, scraped from thousands of hours of video footage, enabled New York police to apprehend Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. They apprehended him in the back booth of a Pennsylvania McDonald's on devices that generate user data. However, Granik noted that we do hold some constitutional and statutory rights that prevent non consensual collection. For one, the Privacy act of 1974 and the E Government act of 2002, they place limits on how federal agencies can use our personal records, and the Fourth Amendment guards against unreasonable searches. And it technically requires the government to obtain a warrant when a search interferes with our, quote, reasonable expectation of privacy. Cases like Riley v. California from 2014 and Carpenter v. United States from 2018 have extended forth Amendment protections to cell phones and geolocation data. Additionally, In a bipartisan 219 to 199 vote in April 2024, the U.S. house passed the Fourth Amendment is not for Sale Act, a bill to close the loophole that currently allows data brokers to sell Americans personal information to law enforcement without oversight. The Senate received the bill last year, but it has yet to take it under consideration. Granite called the decades old legal framework around data privacy, quote, super outdated, remarking that understanding the government's data collection methods requires coming face to face with the increasingly complex pathways that our information travels between different government agencies and private corporations that use it, share it and commodify it. Everybody has a reason to be concerned about surveillance, she said. If people take away from this that there are not enough legal protections for our data, that is the correct takeaway.

[Isaac Saul, Host of Tangle Podcast]

We'll be right back after this quick break.

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[Narrator/Expert (possibly Jennifer Granik or Byron Tao)]

So you might be wondering, how is the government collecting all this data, some of it without our consent, while we're we just let them? The answer is twofold. First, many Americans are either ambivalent or ignorant to what is happening. And two, the government can justify data collection and sharing by pointing to all the benefits the country reaps from these practices. One of those benefits is improved government services for consumers. From a citizen's perspective, government data sharing can make navigating government assistance more streamlined. Currently, many Americans have to provide the same data your name, your Social Security number, your date of birth to multiple governmental agencies separately, filling out forms with the same information repeatedly but with increased interdepartmental data sharing, citizens could fill out a form once and all the agencies would have access to that same data. While this might sound like a small benefit for an individual, this efficiency gain becomes hugely important at a national scale. Not only could improved data sharing reduce the billions of hours Americans spent filling out government paperwork, it could also boost the take up rate of eligible Americans receiving government aid. Currently, about 12% of eligible recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program SNAP do not receive benefits, and 19% of people eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit do not claim the credit. Lesser known programs like the Women Infants and Children's Program have even lower participation rates, with just over half of all eligible Americans participating. A system that automatically determines eligibility for these benefits and then enrolls qualified Americans could help millions of people access billions of dollars in aid. Another benefit that comes from data and data sharing is combating fraud. A recent Government Accountability Office analysis found that the government misspent $925 billion over the last four fiscal years by making erroneous payments. These improper payments mostly occurred for two reasons. One, failure to access available data. In this case, the agency making the incorrect payment actually had access to the data that would have prevented the waste, but for whatever reason, they failed to use it. For example, an agency could have had access to the Social Security Administration's death master file, failed to check it, and then sent a payment to a deceased individual. This was the largest waste cause outlined, responsible for about 67% of all improper payments in fiscal year 2024. The second reason is a lack of access to data held elsewhere. This type of error occurs when the agency making the incorrect payment could have prevented its error by referencing an existing database, but they didn't have access to this database. It accounted for about 8.8 to 20.6% of improper payments over the last four fiscal years. So an increase in data sharing could help address both causes of wasteful spending. In preparing to share data, agencies might move their own into more modern databases or analysis tools. While the primary goal of this data modernization would be to enable sharing, it could have the secondary effect of making these databases also more accessible and easier to use for the civil servants who use it for day to day functions. Another benefit is security. Government data collection in the digital age was kicked off by the events of September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of 9 11, both private companies and the government realized they had all the data necessary to flag the perpetrators as potential terrorists. Their failure to prevent the tragedy was, quote, a failure to connect the dots, byron Tao wrote in Means of Control and A Missed Opportunity to capitalize on the disparate threads of data that the FBI, the CIA, and even the FAA had in the months and days leading up to the tragedy. In the immediate aftermath, some individuals in the government recognized the potential of shared government databases to mitigate future threats. While the program that followed from that idea, called Total Information Awareness, was ultimately shut down, the government has continued to explore methods of data sharing to mitigate national security threats. For example, Section 314 of the 2001 Patriot act facilitated information sharing between financial organizations in order to identify possible terrorist activity and report it to the government. Additionally, in 2008, Congress enacted Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA, which enables the NSA to collect the communications data of foreign persons in order to monitor potential terrorist activity. The NSA says that US Citizens data may be collected incidentally as part of this effort. Also, more recently, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency, established in 2018, offers information sharing programs between the federal government and state, local and territorial governments as well as private entities in order to prevent cyber attacks on the U.S. government or corporations. In recent years, the U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense have cooperated with Palantir to better streamline their data. Palantir co founder John Lonsdale claims that their technology has already helped prevent attacks and neutralize U.S. adversaries. Additionally, a 2024 GAO report found that better information sharing between agencies might help protect government funding from misuse by foreign entities. The final benefit I want to talk about is crisis response. Matt Weidinger, one of the nation's leading experts on government waste during the COVID 19 pandemic, walked us through the shortcuts that states and agencies took when distributing aid in the pandemic years. Federally, he said, agencies shifted to a pay and chase model where they distributed aid broadly and then tried to improperly dispersed funds. Several states made similar trade offs. For example, California stopped cross checking certain databases like matching unemployment recipients against prison rolls, which made it easier for ineligible applicants to be approved. This meant that California sent Covid relief to prisoners.

[John Law, Executive Producer of Tangle]

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest Friday edition. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription. Or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend y'.

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[John Law, Executive Producer of Tangle]

Peace.

[Isaac Saul, Host of Tangle Podcast]

Our Executive Editor and founder is Mitchell Hey Isaac Saul and our Executive Producer is John Lal. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Lal. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will Kbach and Associate Editors Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and John Law and to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our [e-mail].

[Narrator/Reporter (possibly Lindsay Knuth or Russell Nystrom)]

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[John Law, Executive Producer of Tangle]

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