Article by Alfred Ng: “Active-duty members of the U.S. military are vulnerable to having their personal information collected, packaged and sold to overseas companies without any vetting, according to a new report funded by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
The report highlights a significant American security risk, according to military officials, lawmakers and the experts who conducted the research, and who say the data available on servicemembers exposes them to blackmail based on their jobs and habits.
It also casts a spotlight on the practices of data brokers, a set of firms that specialize in scraping and packaging people’s digital records such as health conditions and credit ratings.
“It’s really a case of being able to target people based on specific vulnerabilities,” said Maj. Jessica Dawson, a research scientist at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point who initiated the study.
Data brokers gather government files, publicly available information and financial records into packages they can sell to marketers and other interested companies. As the practice has grown into a $214 billion industry, it has raised privacy concerns and come under scrutiny from lawmakers in Congress and state capitals.
Worried it could also present a risk to national security, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point funded the study from Duke University to see how servicemembers’ information might be packaged and sold.
Posing as buyers in the U.S. and Singapore, Duke researchers contacted multiple data-broker firms who listed datasets about active-duty servicemembers for sale. Three agreed and sold datasets to the researchers while two declined, saying the requests came from companies that didn’t meet their verification standards.
In total, the datasets contained information on nearly 30,000 active-duty military personnel. They also purchased a dataset on an additional 5,000 friends and family members of military personnel…(More)”