When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wants to know where someone works, worships, or travels, it doesn’t need to convince a judge it has probable cause for a warrant. In most cases, it can simply buy the data from commercial data brokers. That giant hole in the Fourth Amendment isn’t some oversight by the federal government bur rather the logical outcome of decades of surveillance battles that Congress has chosen to forfeit.
Immediately after al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Americans have been subjected a virtually nonstop assault on their constitutional freedoms—all in the name of “national security” or “homeland security.”
Much of this, like the infamous STELLAR WIND mass electronic surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, took place in secret, until it was exposed by The New York Times in December 2005. After the Times’ scoop, Congress spent more than two years trying to make the previously secret and illegal program pass constitutional muster. The result was the creation of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a mass electronic surveillance program that, like its predecessor, has been used to violate Americans’ constitutional rights at scale.
Other assaults on the Bill of Rights were mounted in the open: the passage of the PATRIOT Act, largely due process-free round ups and deportations of Arab and Muslim men in the days and weeks after 9/11, an attorney general authorizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to open inquiries into people or groups not wanted for any federal crime, the proliferation of automated license plate readers—the list is nearly endless.
But the most dangerous and far-reaching tools the government uses to violate Americans’ rights over the past several decades come from the private sector, usually in the form of personal data about us, or generated by us, which is then leveraged by commercial data brokers and sold to whoever can pay for it.
Such data include geolocation information, digital ad tracking, social media and web browsing habits and patterns, telephone toll records, and medical and insurance claims data. This and so much more is available for purchase by law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels.
Data broker bundling and sale of all of that data gives federal law enforcement agencies, such as ICE, the ability to build profiles on individuals and civil society groups at a scale and depth the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover could only have dreamed of. But perhaps most concerning is that they can requisition these data without ever having to get a probable cause-based warrant, as normally required by the Fourth Amendment. ICE has been buying and using that kind of data to hunt down human beings in communities across the United States.
Two men in Congress have tried to close that loophole.
During the previous Congress, Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (FANFSA), which would have closed the so-called “data broker loophole” and required police to get a warrant for such commercial data. On April 17, 2024, Davidson’s version of FANFSA passed the House 219-199 on a bipartisan basis. Yet the Senate never took up the bill, and thus far in the 119th Congress Wyden and Davidson have yet to reintroduce it.
Related Articles
The Trump administration continues to politically target California’s transportation funding Mike Hestrin: Proposition 36 is working but the state must fund treatment The folly of Trump’s Greenland obsession California’s government broadband gamble will cost taxpayers Cláudia Nunes: How CEQA is freezing AI competition at the infrastructure level The battle over FANFSA took place against the backdrop of the much more highly publicized legislative drama over whether to reauthorize the FISA Section 702 program—yet another fight Bill of Rights defenders lost with the April 20, 2024, passage of the misnamed Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which actually expanded the scope of the FISA Section 702 program’s reach instead of curtailing its well-known abuses.The Senate’s failure to pass FANFSA, combined with RISAA’s passage, was a worst-case scenario come true for those fighting to preserve some semblance of Fourth Amendment rights for Americans. That one-two punch to data protection has also clearly been key in fueling ICE’s reign of terror in communities across the country.
We may yet witness a replay of at least one of those battles this April, when RISAA is set to expire. What’s not publicly known at this point is whether Wyden and Davidson will reintroduce their bill. What is clear is that FANFSA, or something like it, would make it vastly more difficult for ICE or any other law enforcement agency to end-run the Fourth Amendment—a protection against out-of-control federal law enforcement power that lawmakers would do well to guard.
Patrick G. Eddington is a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute.
Hence then, the article about patrick eddington ice buys its way around the fourth amendment was published today ( ) and is available on The Orange County Register ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Patrick Eddington: ICE buys its way around the Fourth Amendment )
Also on site :
- South Africa pushes for renewable energy investment
- SeaWorld in Texas Is Opening a First-of-Its-Kind Inverted Coaster This Spring
- Zelensky is ‘a man in a desperate position’ – Orban