This shouldn’t be about making it so 3 letter agencies can’t buy data. It should be about making it illegal to collect and sell that data in the first place.
This. They’re definitely barking up the wrong tree here. The problem isn’t that government agencies can simply buy it from brokers. The problem is that companies and data brokers can collect all this data in the first place.
I feel like this is the forest-through-the-trees comment. The data shouldn’t exist and that should be the direction of legislation. If it’s available for purchase then I think it would be weird that any schmuck could buy it but not the government. If the data collection is stopped, no one gets it and everyone wins.
Also, if something is technically possible but illegal for the CIA/FBI/etc to do, it just means they have to try to hide the fact they’re still doing it
They still need data to be collected on everyone. They’re just going to start buying the data of all the “bad” people which will be a third of the population.
The amount of hoop-jumping everyone in this country has to do to convince the Supreme Court to actually enforce the articles and amendments of the constitution unless it’s the 2nd amendment is both infuriating and incredibly telling.
New strategy: convince them this data collection includes information about their guns, and these third parties are collecting it in order to take them away.
Section 504’s massive expansion of surveillance. Through an innocuous-seeming change to the definition of “electronic communication service provider,” the bill would vastly expand the universe of entities inside the U.S. that must assist the government in conducting Section 702 surveillance. Going forward, it would not just be entities that have direct access to communications, like email and phone service providers, that could be required to turn over communications. Any business that has access to “equipment” on which communications are stored and transmitted would be fair game. That means hotels, libraries, coffee shops, and other businesses that provide wifi could be compelled to serve as surrogate spies, structuring their systems so that they can give the government access to entire communications streams. Conscripting U.S. business into intelligence agencies’ service was a feature of the 2007 Protect America Act; Congress explicitly and appropriately rejected this feature one year later when it passed Section 702.
brennancenter.org
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