Ending Privacy’s Gremlin: Stopping the Data-Broker Loophole to the Fourth Amendment’s Search Warrant Requirement

Advances in technology require upgrades in the law. One such area involves data brokers, which have thus far gone unregulated. Data brokers use artificial intelligence to aggregate information into data profiles about individual Americans derived from consumer use of the internet and connected devices. Data profiles are then sold for profit. Government investigators use a legal loophole to purchase this data instead of obtaining a search warrant, which the Fourth Amendment would otherwise require. Consumers have lacked a reasonable means to fight or correct the information data brokers collect. Americans may not even be aware of the risks of data aggregation, which upends the test of reasonable expectations used in a search warrant analysis. Data aggregation should be controlled and regulated, which is the direction some privacy laws take. Legislatures must step forward to safeguard against shadowy data-profiling practices, whether abroad or at home. In the meantime, courts can modify their search warrant analysis by including data privacy principles.

Publishing NextGEOSS data on the GEOSS Platform

This paper is the second of a series that describes some of the main dataset resources presently shared through the GEOSS Platform. The GEOSS Platform was created as the technological tool to implement interoperability among the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS);it is a brokering infrastructure that presently brokers more than 190 autonomous data catalogs and information systems. This paper is focused on the analysis of the NextGEOSS datasets describing the data publishing process from NextGEOSS to the GEOSS platform. In particular, both the administrative registration and the technical registration were taken into consideration. One of the most important data shared by the GEOSS Platform are the NextGEOSS datasets: the present study provides some insights in terms of GEOSS user searches for NextGEOSS data.

Multi-scale hydrological system-of-systems realized through WHOS:the brokering framework

Global Change challenges are now systematically recognized and tackled in a growingly coordinated manner by intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations.Heterogeneous observing networks provide the founded data sources to assess the Earth environmental status and take sound decisions to achieve a sustainable development.WMO Hydrological Observing System(WHOS)allows to discover and access historical and near real time hydrological observations.WHOS represents the hydrological contribution to the wider WIGOS-WIS system of WMO.It is a digital ecosystems framework contributed by a set of data providers and technical support centers.In this framework,three regional pilots were successfully completed.The WHOS architecture applies the services brokering style,implemented through the Discovery and Access Broker technology.A brokering approach makes a global system of systems possible and sustainable,where the different enterprise systems are enabled to interoperate,despite they implement heterogeneous communication interfaces and data models.In this manuscript,the WHOS brokering solution is detailed by recurring to the definition of a set of transversal viewpoints to describe the important aspects of the complex ecosystem–namely:enterprise,information,computational,engineering,and technological views.Finally,the three regional pilot ecosystems are described as successful cases of WHOS implementation.