CIA Data Collection, India Bans Chinese Apps, Korea Slaps American Tech With Fines

February 14, 2022 – Declassified documents released Thursday reveal the Central Intelligence Agency conducted bulk information gathering on Americans without approval or oversight from courts.

Senate Intelligence Committee members Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, released documents Thursday that revealed the CIA conducted this program via Executive Order 12333, signed in 1981 by then-President Ronald Reagan.

According to a joint letter submitted to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board by Wyden and Heinrich in April of 2020, the CIA program existed “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] collection.

“But what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law,” Wyden and Heinrich said in a joint statement.

“In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context,” the statement added.

India continues to ban China-linked apps

India banned over 50 apps with ties to China on Monday.

According to reporting done by TechCrunch, many of the apps were clones or reskins of apps that had previously been banned by India, beginning in 2020.

In June of 2020, India kicked off its trend of app banning when it banned TikTok, which hit 2 billion downloads in 2020.

Though the Indian government has not explicitly mentioned China in these waves of app bans, it has raised concerns over consumer privacy and data collection as a threat to national security.

The apps banned in this most recent wave include a battle royal shooter, Free Fire, published by Sea Ltd. Seemingly in response, the company’s stock plummeted 19 percent. Other apps that were banned were products of giant tech firms including Tencent and Jack Ma’s Alibaba.

Korean antitrust body fined big tech for unfair business practices

The Yohap News Agency reported that the Korea Fair Trade Commission fined Netflix and Google  $16,300 on Sunday for using allegedly deceptive information to prevent subscribers from ending their paid memberships, or in some cases, outright disallowing users from terminating said memberships.

In addition to the fine, the KFTC ordered the companies to cease the unfair practices.

The fine decidedly represents one of the smallest levies against Google in recent years, after the company faced a $2.8 billion antitrust case in the European Union in 2021.