This is the case whether it’s the National Security Agency hoovering up our telephone call data and various other electronic communications and documents, the FBI amassing a facial recognition database with hundreds of millions of photos (including those taken from state driver’s licenses), local police mounting license-plate trackers on patrol cars and using “stingray” devices to mimic cell towers and intercept data and track hundreds of cellphones at a time, or Transportation Security Administration agents needlessly harassing travelers at airport security checkpoints.
Last week, a U.S. Senate amendment to an appropriations bill came within one vote of expanding the USA PATRIOT Act and granting the FBI access to citizens’ internet browser histories without a court order. Moreover, this was a procedural vote that required 60 votes for passage, which means that a solid majority of the Senate believes that the government has the right to perform warrantless searches of every website visited by every person in the country. (Sen. Barbara Boxer voted no on the motion, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein was one of four senators who did not vote.)
Knowing how things work in Congress, however, we are just some minor arm-twisting away from a re-vote that will successfully swat down those pesky defenders of constitutional rights and civil liberties in short order.
This followed on the heels of the House voting down, with 222 members voting no and 198 yes, an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless searches of Americans’ communications and prevented the government from mandating that companies include a “backdoor” in their encryption technologies that the government (and unknown numbers of hackers and identity thieves) could access.
