We lost the battle on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which federal agencies have used to surveil Americans without warrants, in the House of Representatives last week — barely.
A group of liberty-minded Republicans were fighting to add two major things to FISA: a requirement for a warrant and a ban on federal intelligence agencies from buying American information from online data brokers. In close votes, those attempts failed, which means federal agencies can continue their (illegal) practice of snooping on fellow Americans.
Obtaining a warrant is a vital part of the rule of law and a requirement by the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution to boot.
Stalin would have wished he had something like FISA. Not because of the lack of warrants — the KGB definitely didn’t care about that — but because of something just as, if not more, sinister: the government’s practice of buying American citizens’ data from data brokers.
Data brokers collect an obscene amount of data on everyone who uses the internet. The types of places we’re searching on Google Maps? Collected and sold. The type of content we read the most often? Collected and sold. The ads we don’t skip over? Collected and sold. Even key words we say in conversations that our phone mics pick up — collected and sold. Worse, we willingly give this information away every time we hit “accept all” on terms and conditions — terms and conditions we must accept to use pretty much any part of
