Thomas Massie (R-KY) has drafted a bill with the help of Naomi Brockwell (Ludlow Institute)—and introduced it co-sponsored with Lauren Boebert (R-CO)—which addresses the “third-party loophole” where the US government is able to obtain huge amounts of personal information from data brokers and other data collectors without a warrant or any oversight.
The Surveillance Accountability Act would:
Require a warrant for targeted investigations
Require a warrant for all surveillance
Prohibits warrantless use of facial recognition and license plate readers in public spaces
Eliminate buying data from data brokers by agencies where a warrant would typically be needed to obtain that data directly
Allow people to sue the government when their rights here have been violated
Will this have any muscle in the face of a FISA warrant? Imagine not (domestic vs foreign scope), but relevant as those could be used (as they have been in the past [1]) to more or less circumvent the meat and potatoes here when expedient.
Of note is that the proposed legislation provides a massive loophole on page 3, line 17:
"The collection or analysis of information that is lawfully published or voluntarily made available by a person or entity to a public audience, and which requires no circumvention of privacy settings, encryption, or other access controls."
So that just means that any given website or service with information that can be public facing on a web page can be set up to be accessed by anybody who knows how to navigate to it, even if it's not on the user's profile page. Or other ways, such as having a request list.
Why do we need new legislation for this instead of just existing legislation? If an individual was to do what these companies do against another individual it would rightfully be considered creepy as fuck and they'd be charged with stalking.
That shouldn't change even if someone buys a modern papal indulgence[0] yet somehow it does.
Thomas Massie (R-KY) has drafted a bill with the help of Naomi Brockwell (Ludlow Institute)—and introduced it co-sponsored with Lauren Boebert (R-CO)—which addresses the “third-party loophole” where the US government is able to obtain huge amounts of personal information from data brokers and other data collectors without a warrant or any oversight. The Surveillance Accountability Act would:
Require a warrant for targeted investigations
Require a warrant for all surveillance
Prohibits warrantless use of facial recognition and license plate readers in public spaces
Eliminate buying data from data brokers by agencies where a warrant would typically be needed to obtain that data directly
Allow people to sue the government when their rights here have been violated
More info:
Full text: https://boebert.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/boebert.house.g...
https://boebert.house.gov/media/press-releases/representativ...
https://xcancel.com/RepThomasMassie/status/20473811214788526...
https://xcancel.com/mullvadnet/status/2047324151858229526#m
Will this have any muscle in the face of a FISA warrant? Imagine not (domestic vs foreign scope), but relevant as those could be used (as they have been in the past [1]) to more or less circumvent the meat and potatoes here when expedient.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fisa...
The website has no way to actually read the legislation itself, but it can be found here: https://massie.house.gov/uploadedfiles/surveillance_accounta...
Of note is that the proposed legislation provides a massive loophole on page 3, line 17:
"The collection or analysis of information that is lawfully published or voluntarily made available by a person or entity to a public audience, and which requires no circumvention of privacy settings, encryption, or other access controls."
So that just means that any given website or service with information that can be public facing on a web page can be set up to be accessed by anybody who knows how to navigate to it, even if it's not on the user's profile page. Or other ways, such as having a request list.
Why do we need new legislation for this instead of just existing legislation? If an individual was to do what these companies do against another individual it would rightfully be considered creepy as fuck and they'd be charged with stalking.
That shouldn't change even if someone buys a modern papal indulgence[0] yet somehow it does.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47735751