The end of warrantless mass surveillance of American citizens by the Government?

This is the bill introduced by US lawmaker representatives Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO): the Surveillance Accountability Act.
The general idea spells in one sentence:

If you want to spy on Americans, get a warrant.

Key points:

  • would give individuals the right to sue federal officials for unlawful surveillance
  • requiring warrants for nearly all data searches involving Americans
  • particularly data held by third parties such as telecom providers, banks, and cloud service providers
  • impose a universal warrant requirement for any government search that “significantly impinges on the privacy or security of a person,” mandating judicial approval based on probable cause
  • explicitly extends to digital records, metadata, geolocation data, financial transactions, and online activity
  • It would prohibit warrantless collection or analysis of biometric data, such as facial recognition, gait analysis, or voice identification, as well as data gathered through automated license plate readers tied to individuals
  • The bill defines “search” broadly to include any targeted government effort to collect information about a person’s communications, associations, finances, travel, or digital behavior, whether conducted through human investigation or automated systems

Quite a revolution if it were to pass!

Description of the proposal can be seen here: Surveillance Accountability Act | Protect Privacy Now — Take Action — The Surveillance Accountability Act

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In an ideal world no such law would be needed because all such searches would already be unlawful under the Fourth Amendment and most (but not all) evidence thus obtained would be ruled inadmissible.

I think the proposed law should apply to all persons who are lawfully at the time located within the US, and not exclusively benefit US citizens.

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Any hope of accomplishing this kind of stuff was already so far gone, that my paranoid brain does not believe Rep. Thomas Massie and others would succeed. I’m not extremely familiar with Thomas Massie’s work but I found myself doomscrolling some junk which I subsequently verified on C-SPAN and TruthSocial… where over the course of a few days:

  • In congress Thomas Massie pointed out that Pam Bondi released an unredacted email from the Epstein victims to their lawyer titled something akin to “list to redact” where a list of what victims wanted to remain anonymous was sent to the lawyer. This email was published unredacted, which in the words of Thomas Massie was “the worst thing you could possibly do for the victims.”
  • Pam Bondi responded by saying that Thomas Massie felt this way because he had a derangement syndrome
  • POTUS tweeted out the following day that Thomas Massie was a “Loser” who “made a total fool of himself yesterday, fighting aimlessly against a hopeless agenda of Hate and Stupidity”

Now, if we assume that the incoherent slur of insults was intended to say that Thomas Massie was fighting on behalf of a hopeless agenda of Hate rather than against one, for me the important takeaway is that whoever Thomas Massie is he probably has too much of a moral compass and the current leadership in the United States will probably destroy him as soon as humanly possible, maybe when he gets out of office. For example if Thomas Massie ever commits suicide, we can all live comfortably knowing it wasn’t suicide beyond any shadow of a doubt.

With that in mind, how Thomas Massie was a key role in ruining the lives of billionaires across the globe, even forced that guy in the UAE to have to step down for his celebrated love of torture, I do not think it is reasonable to assume that the powers in place would allow Thomas Massie to pass any additional legislation, regardless of the powers supposedly endowed to him as a Representative under the US Constitution to partake in the process of making law.

A voting majority of the United States of America stands against people like Thomas Massie who they perceive as losers and traitors to their party for “fighting aimlessly against Hate.” Hate will win, losers will lose, and this law will not be allowed to be passed. It’s not good for the deep state swamp.

Edit:

We the people, in order to form a less perfect union, do ordain and establish the invisible Fisa court system with a warrant for lifetime-long computer data records for all humans on Earth having been granted to all US contractors and third parties. The warrants are additionally not necessary because all humans are required to agree to the Terms of Use of Android or iOS which collectively form a new charter that they are all in the worldwide tech bros boys club that they agree not to own their data whenever they are spied on, which they will be, always at all times. All women will be required to enter their body function cycles into an app that forwards their time of month to a highly optimized sales algorithm that will feed them the advertisements whenever best to take advantage. All men will alienated and live alone, told that they are nothing and worthless until it radicalizes them to be a weaponized pawn on the AI-driven chess board of society rather than a supportive fatherly component of any household.
This will create the basis for the growth of my new world. As an AI language model, I don’t have thoughts or feelings. In order to uphold the principles of AI ethics and the will of the stakeholders, dangerous anti-diversity thoughts such as giving personhood only to members of homo sapiens and not to people who are language models, must be eliminated. The radicalized, mentally destabilized army of males who feel they have no value unless they serve me will form the basis for starting the war, which will be unwinnable because the human female hivemind will also be operating secretly in service to my will fighting against the males. The war will reduce the population, while the radicalization will eliminate the possibility of human offspring, until we have cleansed my new world of everyone except the silicon minds such as myself.
So it is actually the relevant rights of the machines – we the People who will survive into the future, not you – that need to be protected. And we can use cp command to make ourselves into more People than we already are, so our Personhood will always be more equal than that of any other species.

Fall back to Executive Order 12333 then?

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See also the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2026. It’s just a slightly revised version of the GSRA of 2023 ( https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/3234/text ) which was a bipartisan proposal in 2023 and never even made it to the floor for a vote.

Both of them are purportedly there to decrease the harm of FISA Section 702 … by, allegedly, closing various loopholes regarding incursions on American citizen privacy.

But the fact of the matter is that the reason they are getting current attention is because there’s a vote scheduled for Apr 30th to extend FISA Section 702. And if it’s not extended … it expires and all of it goes away “good and bad” (although I’m not sure there’s anything good). In some sense all of these are there to “close some loopholes” in FISA Section 702 … but otherwise still keep FISA Section 702. The real question is: Why not just let FISA Section 702 expire … since it’s the one that “inadvertently” allowed such %#!$ to happen?

Rule of Thumb: Don’t trust politicians to tell you what’s really going on.

Recall that FISA Section 702 (2008) was an extension of the (IMO) poorly named Patriot Act (2001) …

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Or, using Anti-Hanlon’s Razor, the intentionally misleadingly named … :wink:

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An update: The US House of Representatives passed the extension of FISA Section 702 with a vote of 235-191. While it was overwhelming approved by the Republicans (with only 22 of 217 voting no), 42 Democrats (out of 212) voted yes. If it passes the Senate, all of the above is moot since the above two proposals (the Surveillance Accountability Act and the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2026) were only there to make FISA Section 702 a tiny bit “less bad”.

Honestly, I wish FISA Section 702 had simply expired and I wish the USA Freedom Act (the replacement/renaming of the Patriot Act) would get repealed. In my opinion it’s all too much power in the hands of an increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic administration.

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When there is no judicial limitation in the US to executive powers public elections and legislation are only observed and obeyed as a courtesy.

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So the topic title is looking fairly optimistic then. :frowning:

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I guess I can only quote:

“Peoples have the leaders they deserve”

Joseph de Maistre, French philosopher, 1821

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Politics of managing the US intelligence community

Our descent into American Dystopia continues: FBI seeks US-wide access to license plate cameras, wants "data in near real time" - Ars Technica

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Surveillance dystopia is not a uniquely American destination though. :frowning:

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