Call Your Congresscritter and Support This

I am talking about the  Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act (H.R.4639) which bans government agencies from purchasing personally identifiable information (PII) that would otherwise require a warrant or a subpoena.

Ending the loophole that allows for some of the most egregious abuses of civil rights and the right to privacy by the state is a good thing.

The cherry on top is that it would put a stake through the heart of literal vampire. Peter Thiel's Palantir commercial spying technology group.

Anything that is bad for Peter Thiel is good for the rest of us:

Despite opposition from the White House and law enforcement agencies across the United States, a bipartisan bill that recently was passed by the House that would ban the government from buying Americans’ personally identifiable information (PII) from data brokers and aggregators, the bill suddenly is getting renewed attention in the Senate in the wake of a massive security breach that has put gigabytes of information on possibly millions of individuals at risk.

With the support of top Democrats who usually are in lockstep with the Democrat administration of President Joe Biden, the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which was passed in the House by a 219-199 vote, takes aim at closing the data-broker loophole in the law that allow governments to buy data they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain.

Data brokers are companies that buy, aggregate, disclose, and sell billions of data elements on Americans with virtually no oversight and little financial incentive to protect the data they collect.

First introduced in the Senate in April 2021, a nearly identical bill is now being reconsidered in the Senate after its companion bill was passed in the House. And it’s getting much closer attention now in the Senate since disclosure last week of the hack of the computer systems of Florida-based data broker National Public Data that compromised more than 200 gigabytes of nearly 3 billion records containing the PII of an unknown number of “U.S., Canadian, and British citizens.” It’s being described as the biggest breach of PII on record.

The information that government entities have long been able to buy from companies like National Public Data is data that’s been acquired by data brokers and aggregators from common applications, the “scrapping” of publicly accessible websites, and public and commercial databases, all without users realizing it. The data is then used by governments, law enforcement and tax agencies, prisons, even bounty hunters, to do things like track a person’s location without a warrant or probable cause — or even suspicion that anyone in the dataset had done anything wrong.

Of course, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the executive branch would say that there is nothing to worry about, because they would never abuse this power.

Mitigating against this argument is history, which shows that law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the executive branch will ALWAYS abuse such a power.

Much of the business in this space, with Palantir being the apotheosis of this, make their business serving government agencies that want to evade the law and the constitution.

Shut them down.