By now, it is no surprise that governments spend a lot of effort spying on us.

But it shouldn’t take a Senator dropping the dime on a spy program for it to be legal for corporations to notify users that their information is being shared with anybody. Think about how long the terms of service are; given how long they are, one would expect that they tell your push notifications that they might be shared with governments.

The details on this program are still sparse, but Oregon Democrat Senator Ron Wyden has dropped the dime on the fact that Apple and Google are being forced to cooperate with governments by giving them information on what our apps are sending to us as notifications. Our own government prevented them from telling us that our private information was being handed over to foreign governments.

Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications – US senator https://t.co/uGD2trc0bm

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) December 7, 2023

WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) – Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps’ push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday.

In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google and Apple (AAPL.O). Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.

It is not shocking that governments, with a warrant, could subpoena information about your use of a phone. Without a warrant? That isn’t supposed to happen.

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Wyden dropped his bombshell, likely doing so in order to give Apple the ability to reveal the program to its users.

I suggest this possibility because Apple CEO Tim Cook jumped on the revelation to announce that the company welcomed the opportunity to discuss the matter and inform its users about it now that it is public. Apple, unlike Google, markets itself as protecting our privacy and I suspect they were very uncomfortable with being forced to participate in this program.

In a statement, Apple said that Wyden’s letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.

“In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information,” the company said in a statement. “Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”

Google said that it shared Wyden’s “commitment to keeping users informed about these requests.”

There is no indication…yet…that the US government itself is reading your push notifications, but apparently, they have prohibited Apple and Google from notifying users that other governments are.

This brings up questions: why is the federal government helping other governments spy on us, and is our own government using the powers of foreign governments to get around 4th Amendment prohibitions about spying on us?

That would be on-brand for how our government has been getting around constitutional restrictions. The entire censorship complex exists to help the government use private entities to restrict our speech by hijacking private companies’ terms of service to get them to silence speech that the people in power don’t like. Law enforcement, politicians, and intelligence agencies have outsourced censorship to private non- and for-profit corporations while pulling the strings.

This could easily be a way that our government gets into our private conversations–foreign governments suck up our private push messages and then feed them back to the feds as “intelligence” they gathered.

That is simply speculation on my part, but there is no good explanation for why our federal government is preventing tech companies from informing us about what is happening with our data.

How much do you want to bet that Americans’ private information is being funneled into federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies without a warrant?

The chances that it isn’t are minuscule.