By The Editorial Board, The San Gabriel Valley Tribune:
Our privacy rights are under continual assault as governments at all levels routinely violate Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights to be free from illegal searches and seizures.
This is the case whether it’s the National Security Agency hoovering up our telephone call data and various other electronic communications and documents, the FBI amassing a facial recognition database with hundreds of millions of photos (including those taken from state driver’s licenses), local police mounting license-plate trackers on patrol cars and using “stingray” devices to mimic cell towers and intercept data and track hundreds of cellphones at a time, or Transportation Security Administration agents needlessly harassing travelers at airport security checkpoints.
Last week, a U.S. Senate amendment to an appropriations bill came within one vote of expanding the USA PATRIOT Act and granting the FBI access to citizens’ internet browser histories without a court order. Moreover, this was a procedural vote that required 60 votes for passage, which means that a solid majority of the Senate believes that the government has the right to perform warrantless searches of every website visited by every person in the country.
Read more of their editorial here.