One of the problems with privacy is that law-enforcement uses private actors to collect personal information to collect data which it would otherwise be constitutionally forbidden from doing.

Senator Ron Widen has introduced the 4th Amendment is not for Sale Act to forbid this.

It’s nice, but the bill should be expanded to the point where Peter Thiel’s Palantir is driven out of business:

Federal agencies have taken advantage of legal loopholes to collect massive amounts of personal information from cell phone and internet users without congressional or judicial authorization for years, but that practice is being challenged by a bipartisan and bicameral group of lawmakers who introduced legislation on Wednesday that would prevent the U.S. government from buying individuals’ information from data brokers without a court order.

Led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a group of 20 senators introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (pdf) in the upper chamber of Congress. Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) also unveiled an equivalent bill in the House.

By closing major loopholes in federal privacy laws—including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the newly proposed legislation seeks to protect everyone in the U.S. from unlawful searches and seizures, one of the key civil liberties spelled out in the Bill of Rights.

In a press release (pdf), the lawmakers said that “while there are strict rules for consumer-facing companies—phone companies like AT&T and Verizon and tech companies like Google and Facebook—loopholes in the law currently permit data brokers and other firms without a direct relationship to consumers to sell Americans’ private information to the government without a court order.”

………

The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a court order before accessing data about people through third-party brokers that “aggregate and sell information like detailed user location data, surreptitiously gathered from smartphone apps or other sources,” The Verge reported Wednesday.

As Free Press Action explained, the bill would also prevent “police and intelligence agencies from buying data on people if the information was obtained from a user’s account or device, or via deception, hacking, violations of a contract, privacy policy, or terms of service.”

In addition, the bill would close loopholes that enable the national security state to buy metadata about U.S. residents’ international calls, texts, and emails, and to collect records about their web browsing of foreign websites. While this is information that would typically require a warrant to access, the intelligence community has found ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment, routinely violating individuals’ constitutional rights in the process.

Call your Congress Critters and tell them to support the bill.

Not only will it force elements of the state security apparatus to behave more ethically, but it will also take money out of the pickets of the data brokers.

H/t naked capitalism.