Skip to main content

The Senate is OK with the government spying on your browser history

 

An amendment in the United States Senate that would have blocked the government from surveilling Americans’ browser history without a warrant failed on Wednesday — by a single vote.

Recommended Videos

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the amendment to the 2001 Patriot Act, which was meant to explicitly restrict authorities’ ability to search both browser and search histories under Section 215 of the act.

Wyden’s measure was essentially meant to block what another amendment was trying to accomplish: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had introduced a measure that would, in effect, greatly expand the surveillance powers of the Department of Justice.

“McConnell is that much closer to give [Attorney General] Bill Barr the green light to spy on Americans’ private information,” Wyden wrote on Twitter.

Fifty-nine members of the Senate just voted in favor of my amendment to block warrantless government surveillance of Americans' browser history. It failed by just one vote. McConnell is that much closer to giving Bill Barr the green light to spy on Americans' private information. https://t.co/IV5ERbte48

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) May 13, 2020

“Now that Americans have been asked to stay home and not move around, they are more vulnerable than ever to abusive surveillance,” Wyden said in his statement. “Now more than ever, during this pandemic, Americans deserve assurances that the government isn’t spying on them as they move around the internet.”

In his own statement, McConnell called the bill “strong” and said that it “strikes a correct and delicate balance” between “the need for accountability with our solemn obligation to protect our citizens, and defend our homeland.”

Common sense tells us this crisis demands more vigilance on other fronts of national security not less,” McConnell said.

A total of 59 senators voted in favor of that amendment, one short of the 60 needed to approve the measure.

According to the Daily Beast, the amendment McConnell introduced would block the FBI from seeing the “content” of searches and browser activity, but it “explicitly permits the FBI to warrantlessly collect records on Americans’ web browsing and search histories. In a different amendment, McConnell also proposed giving the attorney general visibility into the ‘accuracy and completeness’ of FBI surveillance submissions to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court.”

Maya Shwayder
I'm a multimedia journalist currently based in New England. I previously worked for DW News/Deutsche Welle as an anchor and…
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more
Apple TV+ just got a price slash that’s tough to resist, and it won’t last long
The Apple TV main screen.

Apple has just quietly announced that it will be slashing the price on its Apple TV+ offering for a limited time deal.

While Apple prices the service at a standard $9.99 per month usually, it has just cut that way down to $2.99 per month.

Read more