A bipartisan team defends privacy rights
Bill will stop Trump's FBI director, DEA, IRS from violating constitutional protections
ANOTHER VIEW | ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
While many Americans have grown complacent about the federal surveillance state, the U.S. Constitution is clear. If law enforcement agents want to search "persons, houses, papers and eff ects," they should get a warrant.
But Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel recently told the Senate his agency is exploiting a loophole to gather information on Americans.
"We do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us," he said.
In plain English, that means data harvested by the very apps and websites Americans rely on to navigate modern life, then sold to the highest bidder — including the government.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, decried this practice. "Doing that without a warrant is an outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment," Wyden said. "It's particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information."
Fortunately, Sen. Wyden, along with Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, partnered with Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California and GOP Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio to push back on this practice and others from federal agencies trying to skirt around constitutional constraints.
The group re-introduced the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would ban the interception and purchasing of constitutionally protected information without a warrant.
According to Lofgren, the bill closes a much abused backdoor search loophole and "requires the federal government to get a warrant to access Americans' private communications gathered under Section 702, with important exceptions for emergency situations."
It also "requires federal law enforcement to get a warrant to surveil Americans' location information, web browsing data, search and chatbot records, and car onboard and telematics data."
This isn't just an FBI problem. From the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Defense to the IRS, federal agencies have systematically bypassed the Fourth Amendment by simply opening their checkbooks.
Additionally, this legislation "prohibits using surveillance on foreigners overseas through Section 702 as a pretext for gathering data on Americans."
That is a practice long abused over the years despite obviously being unconstitutional.
The proposal, backed by American Civil Liberties Union on one end and Americans for Prosperity on the other, is desperately needed as a check on federal agencies and a recommitment to constitutional rights.
Government agencies of course want to get away with as much as they can. But this is America, where the rights of the people are supposed to come first.
With this year marking 250 years of the great American experiment, it's time for America to get back to its founding principles.
Rein in the surveillance state.
