Political Quotes

On the recordFebruary 15, 2017
Mr. President, today I, along with my colleagues Congressmen Chaffetz from Utah and Conyers from Michigan, am introducing the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act, a bill that protects Americans from seeing their phones and other devices turned into location trackers without so much as a warrant or a warning. While law enforcement agencies can and have obtained, and should obtain, probable cause search warrants from a neutral judge authorizing them to track the location of Americans, in many other cases, government agencies obtain sensitive location information without a warrant. My colleagues, Mr. Chaffetz and Conyers, and I intend to fix that. This is a situation where government agencies' use of new technology has gotten ahead of the laws in ways that would surprise many Americans. Federal, State, and local agencies routinely track Americans' locations through a variety of methods, most of the time without people knowing they are being tracked. Some tracking demands go directly from the government to phone companies. In the first 6 months of 2016, law enforcement agencies submitted at least 86,000 demands to telephone companies for subscriber location data. Some of these demands were for the records of hundreds or even thousands of customers at a time. Law enforcement agencies also regularly track cell phones with the use of a surveillance technology known as a cell site simulator or Stingray.…
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Ron Wyden
Democratic · Oregon

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