Mike Baker

Advertisers, data brokers, and tech firms collect enormous amounts of that data, analyze it, and sell access to it.

Researchers from the study gathered information from 11 regulatory bodies and national inspectors responsible for overseeing intelligence agencies across Europe, and their findings suggest this practice is becoming increasingly common on both sides of the Atlantic.

So, you ask yourself correctly, what exactly are intelligence agencies buying?

One of the study's authors says national security agencies often purchase access to what amounts to a constantly updated stream of bulk commercial data.

They said, quote,

Via commercial vendors, national security agencies typically purchase access to a constantly updated stream of bulk data.

That data contains information on mobile devices' unique IDs, their precise location over time, as well as granular profile data of individual app users linked to these devices."

In other words, agencies are often buying access to information that is continuously refreshed as consumers go about daily life.

And according to the researchers, it frequently goes much further than that.

As the study notes, quote, everything from basic data on age, sex, and location to highly sensitive inferences about political preferences, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs can form part of that data, end quote.

Researchers say commercial data sets can also reveal shopping habits and travel patterns that help build detailed profiles of individual users.

And for agencies tasked with identifying hostile actors or mapping out networks and understanding behavior patterns, the available information can be invaluable.

The study describes the rise of ADINT, that's A-D-I-N-T, ADINT, short for Advertising Intelligence, as a, quote, momentous shift in the way that intelligence agencies operate.

In the old days, of course, you had HUMINT, Human Intelligence, SIGINT, right, Signals Intelligence, OSINT, that's Open Source Intelligence.

And now we can also add ADINT.

Uh-huh.

It's a brave new world.

Researchers say its use is expanding in Europe and the US.

In most democratic countries, intelligence agencies face strict legal requirements when they want to intercept communications, conduct surveillance, or obtain certain categories of personal information.

Those rules were largely written, of course, with traditional intelligence collection in mind The problem is that many of those same safeguards become far less clear when the information is collected by private companies and later sold on the commercial market