Ted Cruz Kills America’s Latest Attempt To Have Functional Privacy Laws

from the this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things dept

This is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.

This week Senator Ron Wyden — one of the few U.S. Senators who takes public and consumer privacy seriously — attempted to pass two bills that would have expanded privacy laws that currently only apply to government employees.

S.2850, or Protecting Americans from Doxing and Political Violence Act, would have extended restrictions on the sale of government official location and behavior data to all Americans. Meanwhile, S.2851 would have extended privacy protections for federal officials and lawmakers to state officials and their staff, in addition to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.

“Members of Congress should not receive special treatment,” Wyden said of the effort. “Our constituents deserve protection from violence, stalking, and other criminal threats.”

Senator Ted Cruz, fresh off his efforts to take free Wi-Fi from school kids, managed to scuttle both efforts, falsely claiming the legislative updates would have stopped sex offender registries from existing:

“Cruz was the sole objecting senator, who claimed without evidence that Wyden’s bill could disrupt law enforcement, “such as knowing where sexual predators are living.”

A survey from U.S. News and World Report last year found that 84% of the public, across partisan ideologies, wants Congress to pass tougher privacy laws. But as we’ve noted repeatedly, our broken oligarchy is too corrupt to function, which has prevented us from passing even basic internet-era privacy protections or regulating dodgy data brokers who track your every click and movement.

The other reason the country doesn’t pass useful privacy laws is because the U.S. government has found it’s trivial to skip warrants and just buy domestic surveillance data from said data brokers. However, so can other international governments and bad actors, a national security hole in our logic that America, once again, has been too corrupt to functionally square.

Congress acts with lightning speed if their own privacy might be at risk, however, as made very clear last year when Congress rushed to pass a law protecting billionaires from having their private jet travels disclosed to the public. But it’s done little to nothing as companies have hyper-monetized our every movement, then repeatedly failed to secure the resulting data.

That’s resulting in increasingly dangerous outcomes, and the country is absolutely begging for a modern privacy scandals that make all past scandals look like some sort of grade school picnic. When that day comes, of course, Ted Cruz (and all the industry-backed “think tankers” who claimed that having even baseline privacy protections would “stifle innovation”) will be nowhere to be found.

Filed Under: congress, consumers, data brokers, legislation, location data, privacy, ron wyden, security, ted cruz