Imagine the government claiming it can open a box of your old letters without a warrant simply because you kept them for more than six months.

Absurd? Under a Reagan-era federal law, that is roughly the legal logic applied to your emails.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), passed in 1986, was a landmark bill that established guardrails for the government’s treatment of private communications in the emerging digital world. At that time, emails were usually downloaded to a personal computer and deleted from servers. That law thus contained a loophole that allowed government agencies to obtain stored electronic communications more than 180 days old without a warrant.

One tech provider warns that today that “Gmail will NOT automatically delete your old emails after any timeframe. Messages from 5, 10, or even 20 years ago will sit in your account forever unless you manually remove them.”

Technology changed. The law didn’t.

That is why PPSA applauds Reps. Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) and Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), for updating the law with the bipartisan Email Privacy Act. The bill would require the government to obtain a warrant before accessing the contents of Americans’ emails and other stored electronic communications, regardless of how long they have been stored. It would also permit service providers to notify customers when the government seeks their information, unless a court orders otherwise.

“The Fourth Amendment is clear: the government must get a warrant before searching an individual’s private property, including written communications,” Rep. Davidson said.

Sen. Lee similarly noted that “Americans should not lose their Fourth Amendment protections simply because their private communications are stored with a third-party provider.”

They are exactly right.

Our emails can contain medical information, financial records, family conversations, political discussions, and the intimate details of our daily lives. The idea that constitutional protection should diminish after 180 days is a relic of the dial-up era.

This bill also demonstrates that privacy reform remains one of the few issues capable of bringing together serious conservatives and progressives. These legislators deserve our praise for recognizing a simple principle: a private communication does not become government property as it ages.
​
Congress should pass the Email Privacy Act and apply the Fourth Amendment to the reality of 21st century technology.

​The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Chatrie v. United States settled one important question while raising another that Congress can no longer ignore.

If the government needs a warrant to compel Google to disclose Americans’ location records, why should it be able to sidestep that requirement by buying the same records from a data broker?

Chatrie’s Principles

In a 6-3 opinion, the Court held that Americans retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in detailed cellphone location records, even when those records are held by a third party such as Google. Police therefore conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they compel disclosure of that information through a geofence warrant. 

In writing the majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan recognized a simple truth about modern life: carrying a smartphone inevitably generates an extraordinarily revealing record of where we go, whom we visit, who our romantic partners are, which churches we attend, what political rallies we join, and countless other intimate details. Americans do not surrender their constitutional privacy merely because technology companies necessarily store that information. 

But if that is true, an obvious question follows: Why allow the federal government to simply purchase the very same information from a commercial data broker?

The Data Broker Loophole

Today, at least a dozen federal agencies have acknowledged buying commercially available personal data. These include the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and elements of the intelligence community. Instead of obtaining a warrant approved by a judge, these agencies often obtain access simply by writing a check.

This practice has become known as the “data broker loophole,” a gaping privacy vulnerability that turns the Fourth Amendment inside out.

Suppose police could not constitutionally enter your home without a warrant, but could legally pay your neighbor to climb through the window and photograph every room. Few Americans would believe the Constitution permits such an end-run around judicial oversight. Yet that is effectively what has developed in the digital age.

Commercial data brokers aggregate astonishing quantities of personal information collected by smartphone apps, advertisers, financial transactions, connected vehicles, and countless online services. These databases can map a person’s movements, habits, religious observance, medical concerns, political associations, and relationships with extraordinary precision. Agencies can often acquire such data without ever demonstrating probable cause to a court. 

Now, Chatrie pokes holes through the government’s thin rationale by holding that highly revealing location histories remain constitutionally protected even when maintained by private companies.

If the Constitution bars the government from compelling disclosure without a warrant, Congress should not permit agencies to obtain the same information merely because a private intermediary has placed it on the market.

The bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act would close this loophole by requiring government agencies to obtain a warrant before acquiring sensitive commercially available data. The core provisions of that legislation should be incorporated into Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when it comes up for reauthorization.

The Supreme Court now recognizes that Americans possess a reasonable expectation of privacy in the digital trails their smartphones inevitably create.
​
Congress should finish the job by closing the data-broker loophole when it reauthorizes Section 702.

Jacqueline McNeill of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was driving home from the grocery store – with chicken to prepare for her goddaughter’s funeral, no less – when multiple police cruisers cornered her white Nissan Versa in the parking lot of a convenience store.

“I felt like the moment I stepped out of my car,” she later told Tyler Dukes of Raleigh’s The News & Observer, “I was automatically guilty.” The second-grade teacher was arrested on the spot for a drive-by shooting.

Jacqueline wasn’t guilty of anything, but that didn’t stop her from becoming a victim of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). Days before, these roadside cameras had spotted a car similar to hers in the vicinity of a shooting. As with so many other surveillance systems, police used this image in place of critical thinking, as visual proof when it was nothing of the sort.

And now this far-less-than-foolproof technology – with the privacy protections of a rusted colander – is about to get a massive injection of mission creep.

One of the makers of ALPR technology is Leonardo (pro tip before clicking: you might want to decline all cookies). According to Ian Wright of CarBuzz, the company’s SignalTrace technology “is set to move ALPR cameras from just car-tracking to people-tracking devices.” In plain language, that means tracking drivers’ and passengers’ smartphones, vehicle infotainment systems, and any other Bluetooth-capable device – all linked to your license plate or someone else’s.

Worse, our devices are uniquely and individually identifiable. In the absence of robust legislation designed to bolster our Fourth Amendment rights, the only thing that can prevent them from being used as straight-up spy tools by authorities is end-to-end encryption.

Wright reports the SignalTrace product sheet promises to “create a unique, trackable ‘electronic fingerprint’ for investigative use.”

But wait, there’s more! The surveillance dragnet Leonardo is creating includes RFID tags (they’re everywhere, including key cards), pet microchips (so much for taking your dog along on errands), tablets, fitness trackers, tire pressure sensors, and… you get the idea.

If there’s a kicker in all of this, it is another passage Wright quotes from the SignalTrace product sheet, which boasts that it “stores device and correlation data securely … for future queries and analysis.”

The dystopian quantum leap, Wright notes, is that once implemented, ALPR systems will transition from identifying vehicles to identifying occupants. All of this data will be unbound by time, stored in a permanently searchable database – just in case we need to be retroactively suspected of something that may or may not have been legal once upon a time and that we may or may not have done in a car that we may or may not have been driving (or simply riding in).

Calling Steven Spielberg: We just found the sequel to Minority Report.

What could go wrong? To name a few risks: false positives; arrests of innocent people; police officers using ALPR systems for stalking and intimidation; and the collection of massive amounts of personal data by for-profit corporations ready, willing, and able to sell that information to any and all comers, including the government. Add to these risks hacking by cybercriminals and bad-faith state actors. It’s all coming to a technocratic authoritarian surveillance state near you.

Because of her false arrest that day, Jacqueline McNeill never made it to her goddaughter’s funeral. She also largely avoided driving her Nissan before eventually selling it.
​
And who can blame her?

The government has yet to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in 2024 by the Cato Institute seeking records on abuses of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Court records reveal, however, that the FBI is withholding 39,650 pages responsive to that FOIA request.

This should be a matter of vital interest to Congress.

Section 702 is a surveillance authority that allows the government to spy on foreign threats on foreign soil, but has been used widely in recent years to warrantlessly spy on millions of Americans whose communications are “incidentally” caught up in the National Security Agency’s global trawl.

So you would think that almost 40,000 pages on possible FBI violations of Section 702 would be at the forefront of the debate over whether to add guardrails and reforms as Section 702 faces reauthorization.

But Congress has been supine while the FBI promises to release only a meager 128 pages in August. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which could add clarity to the FBI’s actions, has also been sidelined by the administration.

Patrick Eddington, a Cato fellow, wrote:

“Congress is being asked to extend, without a warrant requirement, a surveillance program whose compliance record cannot be independently verified, whose oversight bodies have been deliberately disabled, and whose custodians have shown a personal willingness to turn its tools on the press.”

The latter is a matter of particular concern. The previous year saw a rise in “sensitive warrantless searches,” or queries that involve political and religious figures or organizations, as well as journalists.
​
When will Congress get curious and demand the information needed to inform the Section 702 debate?

​The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Monday in Chatrie v. United States marked the biggest advance in digital privacy since Carpenter v. United States in 2018. By recognizing that Americans retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in digital location tracking, such as Google’s Location History records, the Court closed a major loophole in Fourth Amendment law.

But Chatrie is unlikely to be the final word. Like Carpenter before it, the decision is likely to spark a renewed struggle over how to apply this precedent.

One case worth watching is Wells v. State of Texas, which the Supreme Court Tuesday remanded to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

The facts are straightforward. In 2018, Dallas police investigating a fatal robbery obtained a geofence warrant directing Google to identify every device that had been present within a defined area around the crime scene during a 25-minute period in the early morning hours. The warrant eventually led investigators to Aaron Wells, who was convicted of capital murder. 

What makes Wells noteworthy is not the crime but the court's fractured reasoning. Like the Fourth Circuit in Chatrie itself, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals produced no clear majority rationale.

Four judges assumed that obtaining Google's location history constituted a Fourth Amendment search but upheld the warrant because it was supported by probable cause and was – in the language of the Fourth Amendment – sufficiently “particular” about what would be seized. Two of those judges separately explained that the geofence warrant did not involve a constitutional search at all, relying on theories that users surrender their privacy by sharing information with Google. Three other judges concluded that no search occurred for most of the data sought by the warrant. But they further explained that no probable cause existed either because the police obtained a warrant with only the location where a crime occurred, not a suspect. One judge dissented without opinion, and another did not participate. 

That division matters because Chatrie resolved the question about whether a search occurred, highlighting the importance of the remaining disagreement about the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements. On that question, the Wells court was divided 4-3, with one justice dissenting but not explaining the basis for his dissent.

Now after Chatrie, courts must focus on these difficult questions that divided the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. In essence, courts will now focus on how broad is too broad.

How many innocent people may be swept into an investigation before a warrant becomes the digital equivalent of the general warrants the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid?
Those are not academic questions. Geofence warrants have already been used in investigations ranging from bank robberies to protests, and each new case forces courts to balance legitimate law enforcement needs against the privacy rights of countless bystanders whose only “crime” was being nearby.
​
Carpenter reshaped surveillance law for nearly a decade. Chatrie promises to do the same.

​Every Fourth of July, Americans happily celebrate the Declaration of Independence as the birthday of our nation. As we grill our feasts in our backyards, however, we should also remember that the Declaration was not a mere flight of rhetoric. It was the culmination of years of growing outrage over arbitrary government power.
 
The first great spark came in 1761, when Boston lawyer James Otis Jr. challenged the British Crown’s use of Writs of Assistance – “general warrants” that allowed customs officials to search homes, businesses, and ships without individualized suspicion.
 
John Adams, then a young lawyer watching Otis argue, never forgot what he heard. He would later say, "Then and there the child Independence was born."
 
The Declaration of Independence would later thus condemn King George III for subjecting Americans to “pretended legislation” and arbitrary rule. The Founders understood that liberty cannot survive when government officials possess unchecked authority to search first and justify later. The Fourth Amendment – requiring a probable cause warrant before government can inspect our persons, houses, papers, and effects – would not be ratified until 1791. But the principles behind the Fourth Amendment’s protections were already growing deep roots long before independence.
 
Today’s government no longer carries paper writs signed by the Crown. And police and the FBI almost always respect the need for warrants to enter homes. But modern technology has created powerful new versions of general warrants. These include:
 

• Warrantless searches of Americans’ communications collected by federal intelligence agencies from global communications under FISA Section 702.

 

• Government purchases of Americans' sensitive location, financial, and internet-browsing data from commercial data brokers, sidestepping the warrant process altogether.

 

• Geofence warrants that compel technology companies to identify everyone whose devices happened to be near a location, treating entire crowds as potential suspects.

 

• Mass collection of license plate reader data, allowing governments to reconstruct the movements of millions of innocent drivers.

 

• The “Make Everyone a Spy” provision that obligates most businesses and houses of worship that provide Wi-Fi and internet connections to secretly spy on their customers and congregants for the National Security Agency.

 
We are thus back to Otis’s age of general warrants, only this time instead of Redcoats ransacking our homes, the government uses AI-enabled algorithms probing our smartphones, data in the cloud, and digital records.
 
As Congress prepares to again debate federal surveillance policy, Members would do well to remember James Madison’s admonition: “In framing a government … you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
 
Will Congress ensure that our government controls itself by placing guardrails on rampant warrantless federal surveillance of the American people?
 
The Fourth of July should remind us why independence was declared in the first place. The generation that pledged its lives, fortunes, and sacred honor did so in part because it refused to live under a government armed with unchecked surveillance authority.
 
The best way to honor that legacy is not merely to celebrate liberty once a year, but to preserve it every day by ensuring that 21st-century surveillance powers remain subject to the same constitutional restraints the Founders demanded from the very beginning.

​General Douglas MacArthur famously told West Point cadets, “We listen vainly, but with thirsty ear.” In classical rhetoric, that’s known as catachresis – mixing two things that don’t belong together in order to deliberately jar your audience.

According to Sophi Charara at Wired, Apple may have plans to create an actual catachresis by putting cameras in its next generation of AirPods. If so, we suggest a marketing campaign along the lines of: “Apple: Our Thirsty Ears Are Watching You.”

It’s likely part of an AI device push, and if Charara’s sources are accurate, Apple employees are currently in the late stages of testing technology that will effectively give Apple eyes on the sides of our heads.

That’s a very different (and highly concerning) privacy profile than what phones are currently capable of – and much more eerily akin to Meta’s invasive smartglasses, for which the law has yet to catch up. Privacy laws, therefore, won’t be up to speed when Apple starts watching as well as listening.

Fortunately, the law may have some time to catch up given the enormous technical constraints of integrating visual intelligence with wireless earbuds.

But Apple will get there eventually, that much is certain. The company’s first attempt at camera-based wearable computing – the Vision Pro – struggled commercially, but the ambition hasn’t died. It’s just getting smaller, cheaper, and easier to wear.
​
All of it serves as a reminder that “wearables” as a category are exploding. In the end, it matters less whether it’s Apple or Meta or Google, or whether the device is a watch or glasses, or earbuds. What matters most is that the time is now for the American people and Congress to proactively apply the law against the inevitable data grab that’s coming.

​When your daily movements are tracked by your cellphone, you likely have an intuitive sense that this is your private information, even if it is shared with Google or Apple.
 
The Supreme Court made that common perception a principle on Monday.
 
In a 6-3 decision in Chatrie v. United States, the Court ruled that you do, indeed, have an expectation of privacy against government intrusion as your mobile devices track your movements throughout the day.
 
Based on a Solid Precedent
 
Monday’s ruling strengthens and extends a principle established by the Court in Carpenter v. United States (2018), which found that law enforcement needs a probable cause warrant to obtain cellphone users’ daily movements from cell towers.
 
In Chatrie, in which police conducted a broad search of many people’s location histories in order to catch a bank robber, the Court is now setting a broad principle that promises to extend to cases regarding other forms of data held by companies in the cloud.
 
The Court found that Google’s Location History “resembles other private materials – think of emails, documents, photographs, or calendars – that even if stored on Google’s servers, a user reasonably views as his own. And as a result, that he reasonably expects to be shielded from the ‘inquisitive eyes’ of the government.”
 
How We Got Here
 
The Court had to weigh the implications of Carpenter against the Fourth Circuit’s finding that the defendant “did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours’ worth of Location History data voluntarily exposed to Google.”
The majority opinion declared that the comparisons between Location History and cell-site tracking “practically leap off the page.” Cell-site tracking places an individual within one-eighth to four square miles. Google’s Location History placed Chatrie within twenty meters. In addition to this data’s precision, the Court noted the government can retrospectively construct the movements of cellphone users, effectively placing them under surveillance before they can even think of committing a crime.
 
Monday’s majority opinion reiterated the Court’s observation that modern cell phones are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”
 
Justice Kagan’s Majority Opinion
 
Overall, the government contended that cellphone users voluntarily relinquish their data, that constitutional concerns should be applied on an app-by-app basis, and that the search was too brief to be constitutionally significant.
 
Justice Elena Kagan penned the majority opinion, which bitingly dissected each of the government’s arguments, starting with the assertion that our data sharing is voluntary. Justice Kagan noted that Google repeatedly prompts users to enable Location History. She wrote:
“The first prompt comes when a user initially establishes a Google account. If that spur is ignored, another will arrive when a user sets up a Google app – like Google Assistant, Google Maps, or Google Photos – on his phone or other device. Android (though not iPhone) users are specifically warned that their devices will not ‘work correctly’ unless they turn on Location History.”
 
What about the government’s claim that law enforcement accessing Location History should receive a Fourth Amendment “grace period” of some number of hours? Justice Kagan sardonically referred to this short grace period of a few hours as a “Constitution-free zone.”
 
At risk, she wrote, were “trips that a person is apt to think ‘indisputably private’ to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center … or the criminal defense attorney.”
 
Justice Kagan’s analysis tracked PPSA’s amicus brief, in which we held that “where the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies regardless of ‘the quality or quantity of information’ the government obtains.”
 
Justice Kagan also turned to how cellphone technology is actually used today to demolish the government’s idea of analyzing the constitutional implications of a search feature by digital feature. She wrote:
 
“The Government’s app-by-app, feature-by-feature method of granting Fourth Amendment protection misapprehends the very nature of modern cell-phone use. Pretty much everything a person does on a smartphone requires some kind of opt-in – an ‘affirmative act’ beyond ‘powering up’ to utilize a given app or service.”
 
Justice Kagan added:
 
“The Government wishes to disconnect all those [private] uses from the mere act of carrying a turned-on cell phone … with only the latter receiving assured Fourth Amendment protection. But that is to imagine that all of us are living in dumb flip-phone days. The point of carrying smartphones is what is on them” (emphasis added).
 
In its conclusion, the Court’s opinion harked back to Carpenter to define the access of historical location information, whether from a cell tower or Google’s Location History, as a search.
 
Monday’s ruling, however, does not fully resolve this case. The Supreme Court is sending the case back to the Fourth Circuit to define the probable cause requirements for every stage of the warrant process and to determine what the proper scope of the search should be.
 
Still, this is a monumental victory for privacy. Until now, as PPSA emphasized in our amicus brief, Carpenter has been treated by law enforcement as a narrow ruling that did not extend beyond location histories extracted from cell towers. Today’s ruling makes it clear that the Supreme Court intends to apply these Fourth Amendment principles across the digital landscape.

​Imagine if one private company didn't just sell equipment or software to your local police department, but became the operating system for policing itself – managing body camera footage, dispatch records, 911 calls, jail bookings, license plate reader databases, AI analytics, and more, all through a single cloud platform.
 
This dystopian vision, taken to an extreme in the classic film RoboCop – in which a predatory corporation acquires an entire police department – is arriving faster than most Americans realize. The integration of business and policing raises new concerns about privacy, accountability, and the concentration of surveillance power.
 
Vendors are pressing this “operating system” model on police departments, seeking to collect, manage, control, analyze, and optimize the flow of data that contains sensitive information on millions of Americans – including not just suspects, but also their families, neighbors, co-workers, friends, and crime victims.
 
A new white paper released by the American Civil Liberties Union and authored by Jay Stanley with Lauren Yu details all the reasons why the integration of corporate and police priorities can degrade the traditional constitutional protections built into policing.
 
Weak protections for AI-derived data
Stanley and Yu note that with so much collected data, “vendors are pushing AI hard on their law enforcement customers as a shortcut to squeezing value out of data. Examples include video analytics, AI-assisted police reports, and algorithmic inspection of license plate reader data for ‘suspicious’ movement patterns.”
 
What uses might this valuable data serve beyond law enforcement? Many companies pledge not to share, sell, or access data except in tightly controlled, audited circumstances for support and maintenance. 
 
Stanley and Yu write: “The problem is the lack of barriers to violating these promises and the near impossibility of discovering if those clauses are violated because of how easy it is to copy, transfer, and share data without leaving any fingerprints, especially within an opaque private company.”
 
Lack of checks and balances
 
Law enforcement answers to democratically elected officials. Transparency and accountability are enforced by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, email and other data retention requirements, and the budgetary and policy oversight of city councils, oversight boards, internal affairs bureaus, and other officials.
 
Companies lack these checks and balances. Local governments are learning to offload responsibilities to the private sector to shield themselves from public scrutiny. In New Orleans, for example, the police avoid local regulations on facial recognition by using a private organization to apply that technology on their behalf.
 
And when something goes wrong, the authors note, “you can’t use voter pressure to make a bad company ‘resign’ the way a sheriff might do if they do something bad.”
 
Bias toward prosecution
 
The mixture of profit and prosecution could degrade traditional safeguards in police work. Stanley and Yu write:
 
“Vendors in the law enforcement space have an incentive to demonstrate that their products are great at helping police catch criminals. This means that they have a financial incentive in being able to say that their products led to a high number of arrests and convictions – they gain no marketing advantage when crime is low and people go free.”
 
Vulnerable honeypots
 
For decades, police records tended to remain scattered among thousands of local departments. But cloud computing changes that equation. Information that once sat on local servers is increasingly stored in centralized corporate systems, creating nationwide repositories of highly sensitive data.
 
With so many companies centralizing and storing police data in the cloud, vendors are creating “honeypots” of sensitive data attractive to hackers. “Worsening the situation is the fact that good cybersecurity costs money, and yet most costs of breaches often fall not on the company but on ordinary people.”
 
As surveillance technologies become more powerful and more interconnected, policymakers should ensure that constitutional protections evolve just as quickly. Otherwise, the greatest expansion of police surveillance may come from corporations quietly becoming policing’s digital backbone, if not its brain.

​Emily Kopp of the Daily Caller writes that “FISA Section 702 targets foreign nationals, but it also hoovers up the communications of Americans when they’re on the other end of the text thread or email chain. The FBI can peer into its classified mass surveillance database for dirt on Americans without ever asking a judge for a warrant.”

Kopp reports:

“Some Members of Congress and the corporate media frequently cite the intelligence community’s claim that Section 702 informs 50-70% of items in the President’s Daily Brief, while never specifying how much of this intelligence requires warrantless spying on Americans.”

The article quotes PPSA General Counsel Gene Schaerr:

“What the ‘intel bros’ constantly do is conflate the use of Section 702 to surveil foreigners with the use of Section 702 to surveil Americans. They’re constantly playing this game of flimflam. Nobody disagrees that Section 702 is really important. The question is why do you need to surveil Americans? They never even try to make the case.”

Kopp’s reporting raises a point that should be top of mind when Congress once again considers reauthorizing Section 702.

“A recent court filing revealed the FBI holds 39,650 records that may shed light on the frequency of abuse. But the Department of Justice (DOJ) won’t release even a tiny fraction until August – by which time it’s likely the Bureau’s spooks will have already secured an extension of the program.

“The scale of the FBI’s snooping is unknown. But it’s clear that any American can fall into the FBI’s dragnet, even the president, Schaerr points out.”

Kopp also reports that Members of Congress have read a March legal opinion from the FISC, revealing routine abuses of Americans’ constitutional rights. The ruling remains classified, but press reports indicate that it sharply criticized a filter on the mass surveillance database that underreports searches of Americans’ information.
​
Read Kopp’s Daily Caller piece here.

​It’s a bookmark that only privacy advocates would ever think of creating. Maintained by Kansas Watch, it’s a catalog of abuses related to automated license plate readers, called the ALPR Abuse Library. Since 2019, there have been 64 documented incidents in 26 jurisdictions.

Of those, 20 involve stalking or targeting (along with eight other distinct categories of violations). Here are a few of the recent stalking entries, each of which the site links to original sources:

• Former officer used police databased to track his mistress and harass her with thousands of texts and phone calls

 

• Ex-detective misused police resources to track spouse; child sex abuse material found

 

• Sheriff used Flock cameras to search for wife’s vehicle

​

• Police officer allegedly used department database to stalk woman he met on at a television shoot

According to the Institute for Justice (IJ), which also tracks such police-related incidents, the root cause is one we’ve discussed many times: the complete absence of a search warrant as required by the Fourth Amendment, which, warns IJ, “predictably allows officers to abuse their access to these systems for things like stalking romantic partners.”

For those concerned about potential abuse of ALPR systems (particularly those made by Flock Safety), one place to begin is to see if your license plate shows up in publicly available search databases such as Have I Been Flocked. IJ also operates an education and advocacy site devoted to fighting the unconstitutionality of ALPR technology, called The Plate Privacy Project.

The warrant requirement in the Constitution precedes the electronic era. The Founders’ primary reason for including it was a concept as familiar then as it is relevant now: Searches that are overly broad, unsupported by cause, and conducted without oversight are sure to be abused – a danger the Founders knew was ripe for exploitation in any age.
​
When police can misuse ALPRs for petty, personal reasons, the eventual abuse of these systems by government officials for larger political reasons is virtually assured.

​In our last post, we reported on leaks that reveal that the Bulgarian government has approved the export of advanced spy technologies to governments around the world, many of them with poor ratings for their treatment of human rights, press freedoms, and political dissent.
 
Thanks to this technology, tyrants, tormentors, and regimes around the world have gained unprecedented capabilities to intercept communications, track individuals, and harvest sensitive personal data – texts, emails, and calls – through defects in global telecommunications systems.
 
Who is behind this privacy apocalypse?
 
The Same Players Keep Appearing
 
Human Rights Watch notes that the company selling these exploits, Circles, was founded by Tal Dilian, who also founded Intellexa, maker of the Predator zero-click tool. Dilian was sanctioned by the United States in 2024 for activities connected to the development and distribution of commercial spyware used against journalists, dissidents, policy experts, and government officials. Circles itself also has historical ties to NSO Group, the maker of Pegasus. 
 
The result is an ecosystem in which a relatively small group of firms and executives have repeatedly surfaced in controversies involving surveillance abuses around the world. Their activities demonstrate how interconnected the commercial spyware industry has become.
 
A Growing Threat to Privacy and Democracy
 
Such technologies often operate in secrecy, with little transparency, limited judicial oversight, and no remedies for victims.
 
Human Rights Watch recently documented how surveillance technologies exported from European countries have been used by governments to target journalists, activists, academics, humanitarian workers, and political critics. The organization concluded that existing controls are failing to prevent sales to countries where there is a substantial risk of abuse. 
 
Figures ranging from journalists in Mexico and India to opposition politicians in Spain, and even a British prime minister, have been targeted by Pegasus software. With the expansive growth of Circles’ new surveillance software, Americans should wake up and realize that we are not immune to this global trend.
 
As PPSA noted in our original reporting on mercenary spyware, American officials have already been targeted by foreign spyware campaigns. The proliferation of these capabilities means that sophisticated digital surveillance is becoming cheaper, more accessible, and harder to contain. 
 
The Lesson
 
The leaked Bulgarian licenses provide another reminder that surveillance technology does not stay confined to the governments that first develop it. In short, the spread of mercenary spyware was once viewed as an emerging problem. Today, it is a mature global industry.
 
The dangers posed by these sophisticated attacks have long been foreshadowed in Congressional testimony and hearings. Yet solutions are not obvious or easy. Like narcotics, surveillance tech often spreads through international markets, private vendors, shell companies, and workarounds of export controls until powerful interception capabilities become available to governments around the world, as well as criminals and cartels.
 
Congress and policymakers must now recognize that this global marketplace for commercial spying tools is thriving and potentially threatens any American. The question is whether democratic governments will establish meaningful safeguards before these technologies become even more pervasive – and even more difficult to control.

​“C-22” just sounds like the name of something dangerous, and thanks to Canada, it is. The country’s government continues to push a privacy-busting measure of epic proportions. As we wrote in May, Bill C-22, “An Act respecting lawful access” to digital data, has the potential to – among a host of other transgressions – end encryption not only in Canada, but worldwide.

The proposal has had three readings in the House of Commons and last week received its first reading in the Canadian Senate. All of this, notes Thorin Klosowski of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has occurred in a complete absence of serious debate. In fact, the Conservative minority has accused the Liberal government of attempting to ram through the legislation through highly unusual and “undemocratic” methods.

This Lawful Access Act, as it’s also known, was recently scrutinized by The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Their findings read like that moment in a blockbuster when the horror-stricken protagonists flip through the pages of a diabolical secret plan, then look despairingly into the distance while the minor chords swell to a crescendo.

And with good reason.

The bill’s second part in particular is a pro-surveillance, anti-privacy juggernaut, which The Citizen Lab sums up as a “mix of open-ended powers, flexible safeguards, and a government-driven oversight framework that excludes strict judicial controls.” The net effect of this new regime will be to create “significant human rights, privacy, and cybersecurity hazards.”

What could possibly go wrong?

In an open letter urging C-22’s withdrawal, the Global Encryption Coalition zeroed in on the privacy Achilles heel that the legislation’s second part represents:

“There is no way to provide backdoor access to encrypted data and communications without compromising the privacy and security of millions of law-abiding citizens. This is particularly true in the wake of new AI systems that can autonomously scan software, find the vulnerabilities created by encryption backdoors, and write attacks to break in.”
​
If ever there was a bill that deserves vigorous debate, says the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, this is it. Even worse, the damage to security and privacy caused by the Salt Typhoon should remind us that killing encryption would be a gift to China, as well as to common criminals.

Ample Time for Debate

The decision by the Trump administration to effectively suspend its push for the reauthorization of FISA Section 702 is a tacit admission of what PPSA has been saying all along: there is no credible national security reason to rush this process.
 
While the statute has expired, Section 702 intelligence collection will continue under orders issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) until March 2027. In the meantime, there have been zero reports of problems with intelligence collection – which, to be sure, would be trumpeted by the intelligence community if that were the case.
 
We don’t know when the current legislative muddle on the Hill will clear. We do know that when it does, it will be important to get it right in the next round.
 
Background

This issue deserves debate and deep attention by Congress. Section 702 is the national security law enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreigners on foreign soil, but has been used in recent years to warrantlessly snoop on the international communications of Americans millions of times. Despite procedural reforms enacted into law two years ago, these changes have done little to address the risks of Section 702.
 
Consider this: Earlier this year, the FISC publicly acknowledged the existence of continuing major compliance problems with Section 702 directly related to Americans’ constitutional rights. The court objected to how the FBI, CIA, and NSA use filtering tools to process our messages.
 
While the administration appeals the court’s finding, Congress and the American people are not permitted to know the exact nature of these compliance issues. With the luxury of time, shouldn’t Congress insist on a public accounting of ongoing problems with Section 702 and Americans’ privacy?
 
What to Ask for When Section 702 Reemerges

It is important to keep all this in mind when the current entanglement clears and Section 702 comes up for a vote again. House leadership tried and failed three times to force a vote on Section 702 reauthorization, breaking with tradition by preventing debate on meaningful amendments.
 
The same approach also failed once in the Senate. Leadership in both houses repeatedly tried to push the next reauthorization of FISA Section 702 between three and five years from now – a key reason for the failure of this strategy. One key principle Congress should uphold:
 

• Reject any reauthorization for Section 702 that is longer than two years. AI is supercharging surveillance at breakneck speed. Given the ongoing reports of Section 702 violations – and the escalating ability of AI to pull data from disparate sources to create dossiers on every American – Congress will need to keep oversight prompt.

 
Whenever the path opens to focus again on reauthorization, Members of Congress must insist that this time they be allowed to vote on key amendments:

• Add a warrant requirement for Section 702 searches of Americans’ communications.
  
  
• Apply a warrant requirement to the federal government’s purchase and review of Americans’ sensitive personal data – closing the data-broker loophole.
  
  
• Narrow the definition of “electronic communication service provider” to exclude countless small businesses – and even houses of worship – from being forced by the NSA to assist in spying on customers and congregants. 
  
  
• Stop political abuses in secret FISA Court cases by (a) requiring non-partisan amici to advocate for the American public in sensitive cases and (b) enhancing penalties for government misbehavior.
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• End the obstruction of key Members’ access to the FISA court.

 
Until now, the terms of the debate have been dictated to majorities in the House and Senate. Those dictating those terms have proved unable to enforce them and are now tangled up in a confusing web of competing priorities.
 
It is time for a bipartisan majority to step in and impose clarity. When Section 702 moves forward, it must be with debate over meaningful guardrails to protect the American people from rampant government surveillance.

​Four years ago, PPSA warned about the rise of “mercenary spyware” – powerful surveillance tools once reserved for elite intelligence agencies that were rapidly becoming available around the world. The poster child for this trend was Pegasus, the Israeli-developed “zero-click” spyware capable of silently taking over a smartphone, activating its camera and microphone, turning it into a full-time surveillance device that extracts nearly every detail of a person’s life. 
 
Human Rights Watch reports that the market for such dystopian surveillance technology is now truly global.
 
A new investigation based on leaked Bulgarian export licenses reveals that a surveillance company called Circles received approval to export similarly sophisticated communications interception and phone-tracking technologies to a wide range of foreign governments between 2018 and 2023. According to the documents, Bulgarian authorities licensed exports to Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Israel, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Panama, Serbia, and the United Arab Emirates. 
 
The governments of many of these countries have been criticized by human rights organizations for surveillance abuses, restrictions on press freedom, and crackdowns on political dissent. Human Rights Watch concluded that the licenses raise serious questions about whether European export controls designed to prevent abusive surveillance exports are being enforced. 
 
What Can These Systems Do?
 
The leaked documents describe a suite of surveillance products that far surpass traditional wiretaps. Unlike Pegasus, a “zero-click” capability that could remotely infect your smartphone without you making a single wrong click, Circles’ technology exploits chinks in the global telecommunications infrastructure, capturing your data as it is transmitted.  
 
Among the exported technologies were:
 

• Software capable of tracking the locations of mobile subscribers

 

• Systems that can remotely intercept voice calls and communications data through weaknesses in global telecommunications infrastructure

 

• Tools designed to facilitate targeted interception of communications

 

• Software that can collect voice, message, and internet traffic from cellular devices

 
As one expert warned Congress in testimony highlighted by PPSA in 2022, capabilities once available only to a few nation-states are now available to dozens. CrowdStrike reports an 89 percent increase this year in AI-enabled  attacks. The most advanced surveillance technologies are no longer confined to a handful of superpowers. They could be in the hands of almost any government – and, before long, in the hands of your competitors or personal enemies.
 
In our next post on this topic, we will look at the corporate entities fomenting this global privacy disaster, the implications for privacy and democracy, and the need for Congress and the administration to develop responses.

​Faith communities answer to a higher authority than the state. They preserve independent institutions, foster private associations, and teach moral truths that governments do not control. For that reason, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and religious ministries have often found themselves in the crosshairs of governments eager to monitor dissent.

That is why Congress must repeal one of the most dangerous provisions added to FISA Section 702 in 2024 – the expanded definition of an Electronic Communications Service Provider (ECSP), commonly known as the “Make Everyone a Spy” provision.

The ECSP expansion dramatically broadens the range of people and organizations that can be compelled to assist government surveillance, including most businesses that provide free Wi-Fi to customers and tenants. While the debate often focuses on privacy, the provision also poses a direct threat to religious liberty.
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• Consider the impact of this law on a church-based crisis pregnancy center. Such ministries provide counseling, emotional support, and practical assistance to women facing difficult decisions. Their effectiveness depends on trust and confidentiality. Yet under the ECSP expansion, organizations that merely provide communications infrastructure or access to facilities could potentially find themselves entangled in government surveillance demands while being prohibited from disclosing them.

The chilling effect would be immediate. Individuals seeking spiritual guidance or personal counseling should never have to wonder whether their conversations could become part of a surveillance operation.

History teaches us that such fears are not hypothetical.

• During the 1960s civil rights movement, Black churches served as the organizational heart of efforts to secure equal rights under the law. Meetings, fundraising efforts, strategy sessions, and community organizing frequently took place within houses of worship. Government surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders remains one of the most disgraceful chapters in federal law enforcement history.

Nor is religious surveillance a mere relic of the past.

• In FBI v. Fazaga, Muslim plaintiffs challenged a surveillance operation in which an FBI informant infiltrated Southern California mosques, secretly recording worshippers and collecting information about their religious practices and associations. Innocent believers found themselves under scrutiny not because of criminal conduct, but because of where they worshipped.

 

• More recently, documents released during the Biden administration revealed that FBI personnel discussed developing sources within communities of so-called “radical traditionalist Catholics.” Subsequent disclosures showed that the effort extended beyond a single field office.

And the danger is not confined to one political party. Just as the Biden administration’s treatment of traditionalist Catholics raised alarms, future conflicts between any administration and religious leaders could create similar temptations. Recent tensions between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV illustrate how quickly political disagreements can spill into disputes involving religious institutions.

This is precisely why constitutional protections exist. The First Amendment protects not only the right to worship, but also the right to associate, counsel, organize, and speak freely within religious communities. Those freedoms depend on privacy and trust.

Havel warned that governments seeking greater control cannot tolerate institutions that point to truths beyond official power. Religious communities do exactly that. They remind citizens that there are limits to what government may command and limits to what it may know.

The ECSP expansion pushes in the opposite direction. It creates new opportunities for surveillance to penetrate institutions that have historically served as centers of conscience, dissent, and moral witness.
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Congress should enact the ECSP fix and restore the narrow definition of compelled assistance. No church, mosque, synagogue, pregnancy center, religious school, or ministry should be transformed into an unwilling arm of the surveillance state.

On Thursday morning, the House voted against Leadership’s short-term clean reauthorization of FISA Section 702. Leadership once again stiff-armed any opportunity to propose amendments with badly needed reforms to protect Americans’ privacy from domestic spying.

This strategy marks a significant break with past Section 702 debates. In 2024, for example, House Members were given the chance to vote on a warrant requirement for Section 702 U.S. person searches, which nearly passed in a 212-212 tie vote. This year, what is clearly now a House majority in favor of enacting reforms and placing guardrails on domestic surveillance has been sidelined, multiple times now.

The result, predictably, is what we saw this morning. After multiple attempts, it should be clear to all that stiff-arming meaningful debate and necessary reforms is a failed strategy.

Having demonstrated what doesn’t work, the House can now take a new path. There is no need to rush it. Members in both the House and Senate should know that when the statute behind Section 702 expires on Friday, intelligence collection will still continue. The surveillance orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are in effect – and will remain in effect – until March 2027.

That is how long Congress has to reauthorize Section 702 without in any way jeopardizing national security.

Looking ahead, House Members must be able to vote on a warrant requirement for Section 702, warrants for the purchased data of Americans, and the removal of the so-called “Make Everyone a Spy” provision that obligates most businesses and even houses of worship to assist the NSA in spying on their tenants, customers, and congregants.

These are not trivial issues for Members or their constituents.

•  A 2023 bipartisan poll showed that 76 percent of Americans support warrant requirements before the government can access Americans’ international communications. Some 80 percent support warrant requirements before the government can access location records, internet search histories, and other highly personal digital records.

The time has come for Leadership to respect the majority – the majority in the House and the majority of the American people.
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“I am hopeful that the House is now in a place where it will move forward in a constructive debate that will lead to long-needed reforms,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a PPSA Senior Policy Advisor. “It is time to allow for such a full debate and votes on reform amendments.”

Many news organizations are proving to be better at stenography than they are at journalism.
 
They are repeating – uncritically – bombshell accusations from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in a letter to Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio claiming that drastic steps will be needed to offset the loss of intelligence gathering on threats to the United States if Congress allows Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to expire on Friday.
 
“We write with regret to ask that you plan for a potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection,” the chairmen of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees wrote on Saturday.
 
They should know better.
 
PPSA, other civil liberties organizations, and our champions on Capitol Hill have time and again corrected this canard. When Congress set the next deadline for the reauthorization of Section 702 on June 12, all it meant is that the statute authorizing this surveillance authority will expire. But the actual collection of foreign intelligence will continue.
 
Charlie Savage of The New York Times is one journalist who gets this right. He reported in April:
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“The Section 702 program would not immediately shut down if the statute expired. It operates under certifications that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issues each year authorizing the government to direct communications companies to participate. The key provision says these directives ‘shall continue in effect’ until their expiration dates.”
 
Section 702, which was enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance on foreign threats on foreign soil, will thus continue under the court’s orders until March 2027. That is how long Congress has to debate Section 702 before the collection of foreign intelligence would actually be affected.
 
This debate can continue without endangering national security. And the reforms that are being advanced – warrant requirements for the collection and inspection of Americans’ data, as required by the Fourth Amendment – can be passed by Congress without endangering national security either.
 
We can both protect the American people and uphold our constitutional rights. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Writing in Albany’s Times Union, Fabian Rogers and Jason Taper of privacy watchdog STOP remind us that invasive landlords are nothing new. What is new is the way facial recognition has quietly become a tool for controlling tenants.

Landlords, for obvious reasons, don’t like rent-stabilization policies in many cities. Knowing this, technology firms are now marketing facial recognition products as a way to help landlords find new ways to evict people and raise rents (because, to de-regulate an apartment, you first have to empty it). There’s even a wink-wink industry term for this: “de-stabilize.”
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It’s a technological fishing expedition, and facial recognition tech is the rod. Park a camera at the only door, log every entry and departure, and wait to “catch” a tenant in violation of some technicality – an unauthorized overnight guest or a too-frequent absence that “proves” they don't really live there.

Landlords will use all manner of red herring arguments to whitewash what they’re doing, such as claims of enhanced “safety and security.” In co-author Rogers’ own case, his Brooklyn landlord decided to implement a facial recognition system a mere year after the complex was declared rent-stabilized. Coincidence? The Trojan Horse pitch the landlord used was “frictionless entry.”

Rogers and his fellow tenants weren’t fooled. After they organized, the landlord backed down. In the end, the tenants’ right to privacy trumped the promise of frictionless entry.

This is just one example of how private companies are quietly assembling exactly the kind of always-on surveillance the Constitution forbids the government from building – and that is the loophole. The Fourth Amendment guards your home against the state; it has nothing to say about a property manager with a camera.
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New York's Senate Bill S8223 would ban landlords from using such tech. This makes sense: No one should have to build a tenant movement simply to preserve the basic freedom to come home without being tracked, watched, and cataloged by the place they live.

President Trump’s selection of Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence has already stymied the hard push by Senate leadership to force through the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Most on the Hill have so far focused on the oddity of the appointment of a housing official with no military or intelligence experience to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“By any objective assessment – in terms of experience, expertise, background – this appointment makes no sense,” said Sen. Angus King (D-ME). Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) chimed in: “I see no evidence of any qualifications for the job.”

Since this is an acting appointment, however, Pulte’s post will not require Senate confirmation. He can serve as acting Director of National Intelligence until Jan. 26, 2027 – although President Trump now says that this is only a “temporary” appointment. Pulte will, at least for now, also continue to serve as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), as well as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But Pulte’s appointment is sure to focus Congress on the possible uses and abuses of the vast amount of warrantlessly collected data authorized by Section 702. The FBI has abused Section 702 millions of times in the last five years, warrantlessly accessing the communications of Americans through backdoor searches.

To complicate matters, as Pulte moves into his new office, he will still face an inquiry by the Government Accountability Office into whether he misused federal authority and resources to publicly accuse prominent Democrats of mortgage fraud.

Whatever you make of all this, it is not helping the cause of surveillance hawks in the House and Senate who are still trying to ram through the reauthorization of Section 702 without allowing any debate on significant amendments.

The ultimate head-scratcher here is why President Trump would allow his allies to push for a reauthorization of a long-abused surveillance authority when he himself was targeted by the misuse of a related FISA authority in 2016 and 2017.
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PPSA continues to urge President Trump to focus on building a legacy that would reform the surveillance state while bolstering the powers needed to keep America safe. A good place to start would be for House and Senate leaders to allow a debate and votes on amendments that would place guardrails on Section 702.

​A move by Senate leadership to reauthorize the Section 702 surveillance authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without major reforms failed last night in a 52-47 vote.

Seven Republicans joined almost all Democrats: Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), John Kennedy (R-LA), Mike Lee (UT), Rand Paul (R-KY), Eric Schmitt (MO), Rick Scott (R-FL), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

“FISA 702 reauthorization failed because it did not contain a warrant requirement for spying on Americans,” Sen. Lee posted on X. “Come back with a warrant requirement, and we’ll pass the bill.”

Much of the momentum behind the “nay” votes by Democrats was a protest against the appointment of the administration’s housing chief, Bill Pulte, to serve as director of national intelligence. But many senators on both sides of the aisle have also listened to PPSA and other civil liberties groups about the need to add warrant requirements before the government can help itself to Americans’ communications and data. Section 702 has been used in recent years to give the FBI warrantless access to the data and communications of Americans in contact with foreigners millions of times.

The measure would also have extended the next reauthorization by three years. At a time when artificial intelligence is enhancing the power of surveillance at breakneck speed, many senators were sympathetic to PPSA’s contention that three years would be too long before the next reauthorization – Congress’s only regular opportunity for oversight of the intelligence community’s surveillance of the American people.

Expect surveillance hawks to now try to alarm Members of Congress by claiming that national security will be endangered when Section 702 expires on June 12.

Any claims about the lapse of a vital national security authority would be nothing but fear-mongering. Only Section 702’s authorizing statute, Title VII, will lapse on June 12. The actual collection of intelligence will continue through March 2027 under orders already issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“Attempts to impose reauthorization without warrants have now failed twice in the House and once in the Senate,” says Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and PPSA Senior Policy Advisor. “It is time for leaders to end these efforts to rush through measures that majorities oppose and begin to consider reasonable reforms that will protect both Americans’ constitutional rights and national security.”

As the Senate regroups and the House turns once again to the issue, PPSA and our civil liberties coalition support the following reform measures:
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• No more than two years for the next Section 702 reauthorization, giving Congress time to assess the evolution of government surveillance powered by AI.

 

• Pass a warrant requirement for Section 702 searches of Americans’ communications. We cannot continue to allow a foreign intelligence surveillance tool to be turned on our own citizens.

 

• Add a warrant requirement to the federal government’s purchase and review of Americans’ sensitive personal data – curbing the data-broker loophole and ending the routine warrantless inspection of Americans’ highly personal geolocation, internet search history, and internet communications data.

 

• Curb the definition of “electronic communication service provider” under FISA to protect countless small businesses and houses of worship from being forced by the NSA to assist in spying on their customers and congregants.

 

• Prevent political abuses in FISA Title I cases by including the formerly titled “Lee-Leahy Amendment” in the 702 reauthorization. This measure, which passed the Senate in 2020 with 77 votes, would mandate the inclusion of a qualified third-party amicus with expertise in the Fourth Amendment, and holding a high-level clearance, to advocate for the American public in secret FISA court proceedings that implicate American political leaders and other sensitive matters.

PPSA will continue to press Members of Congress to pass these reform measures and we will keep you informed of major developments.

​We’ve long chronicled how China is building the world’s most sophisticated surveillance state. Cameras equipped with facial recognition software, biometric databases, digital tracking systems, and artificial intelligence have become commonplace across the country.

Now, newly reported details reveal a Chinese surveillance apparatus that is even more expansive and well-integrated than previously understood.

In a report by De Zheng for DW, a cybersecurity researcher discovered an exposed Chinese police database connected to a platform known as “Bright Eyes.” The system reportedly maintained extensive records on foreign journalists, visitors, and residents, including passport photographs, visa information, travel histories, and other personal details.

But what makes Bright Eyes remarkable is not merely the quantity of data it collects. It is the way the system combines disparate information into what Chinese authorities call a “holistic personnel archive,” creating “holographic profiles” of individuals.

According to the report, Bright Eyes integrates data from facial-recognition cameras, immigration records, hotel registrations, transportation systems, mobile-phone identifiers, and other databases. The system reportedly can identify not only that a person traveled but also precisely where that person sat on a train, when he entered a venue, and who was nearby.

De Zheng notes: “It even synchronizes photos from different camera systems and checkpoints, creating a continuous visual record of a person's movements.”

Because the system has access to multiple streams of information, authorities can reconstruct a person's activities with extraordinary precision. Officials can analyze not only an individual's movements but also relationships, routines, and patterns of behavior over time.
Perhaps most striking is the system's apparent emphasis on social connections.

The report describes analytical tools designed to determine “how frequently targets are captured interacting on camera, revealing exactly who knows who, and how much time they spend together.” The system maps human networks for social and political analysis.

China’s surveillance architecture offers a warning about the direction technology can take when constitutional constraints are absent. The technologies involved – artificial intelligence, facial recognition, data aggregation, and predictive analytics – are becoming more powerful.

The Solomon Islands in the South Pacific provide a stark example of how this surveillance state can be exported. David Pierson and Berry Wang of The New York Times detailed the pushback by local residents after China installed its “model police state” through a secret agreement with that country’s government.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute warned that the Solomon Islands is becoming China’s “proving ground for authoritarian practices under the guise of community service.” An official mouthpiece of the Chinese government described such Western reactions as “the discomfort of former colonial powers whose exclusive influence in the Pacific is no longer assured.”

But who is the real imperialist in this scenario?

The lesson for Americans is straightforward. Privacy is more than a setting. It is the condition that makes free speech, free association, religious liberty, and a free press possible. Once governments acquire the ability to know everything about everyone, the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourth Amendments become increasingly difficult to exercise in practice.

China’s “holographic profiles” show why constitutional limits on surveillance matter now more than ever. That’s something for Congress to keep in mind when it considers whether to revisit surveillance policy in the ongoing Section 702 debate in two years or much longer.
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The speed at which artificial intelligence is evolving should lead Americans to insist that Congress keep a tight leash on any would-be American version of Bright Eyes.