2.24.2024

That house in DC is in the news again

Surveillance Fight Pits the White House Opposite Reproductive Rights

Prominent advocates for the rights of pregnant people are urging members of Congress to support legislation that would ban warrantless access to sensitive data as the White House fights against it. 

“The implications for Americans’ privacy rights are staggering.…It makes little sense to rein in warrantless surveillance under one authority when the government can simply fall back on other available techniques to acquire similar information.”

The lawsuit here is new but the warrantless surveillance issue is not. There's been a great deal of fuss for quite some time (Snowden was in the news just over a decade ago) over multiple agencies at every level of government collecting unwarranted personal information from U.S. citizens. Laws have been passed, with great fanfare, to prohibit that. And they've all been neatly sidestepped by purchasing the prohibited information from commercial data brokers, if which there are, by now, many.

And that's not all. The same information is available, globally, to anybody with a buck. Or a yuan, or a ruble, or a rial…. Or an AI.

This privacy ship sailed a long time ago.

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