“Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate whether domain name registry Neustar violated the privacy of millions of Americans ‘when it sold records of where they went online to the federal government.’
Wyden’s letter to the FTC states that in 2016, the Department of Defense funded a research team at Georgia Tech to purchase Neustar’s data. The senator obtained communications between the researchers and ‘both the FBI and the Department of Justice, indicating that government officials asked the researchers to run specific queries and that the researchers wrote affidavits and reports for the government describing their findings.’
Additionally, Wyden cited a statement by the Department of Justice, in an unrelated court case, which he says alleges that Neustar executive Rodney Jeff, ‘who led the company’s efforts to sell data to Georgia Tech, was also involved in the sale of DNS data directly to the U.S. government.’”