Dang. They should have deleted more. But the fact that they were able to obtain identity information from IRS records while not being government employees (or even if they were), shows that the real identity theft risk is how much data the government has on you. This was Snowden's point. You can never create a data system with zero human access. Someone has to run the thing. So collecting data the government shouldn't have and "protecting" 4th amendment rights by making laws around how it can be accessed doesn't work. It can and will be accessed outside of those non-barriers. So the 4th amendment violation is collecting it in the first place.
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Dang. They should have deleted more. But the fact that they were able to obtain identity information from IRS records while not being government employees (or even if they were), shows that the real identity theft risk is how much data the government has on you. This was Snowden's point. You can never create a data system with zero human access. Someone has to run the thing. So collecting data the government shouldn't have and "protecting" 4th amendment rights by making laws around how it can be accessed doesn't work. It can and will be accessed outside of those non-barriers. So the 4th amendment violation is collecting it in the first place.