The armed Florida State Trooper raid on Monday on the Tallahassee Florida home of data scientist and COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones was shocking on many levels. This incident smacks of retaliation against someone working to provide the public with truthful information about the most pressing issue facing both Florida and our nation: the spread and impact of COVID-19. It was an act of retaliation that depended on two broken systems that EFF has spent decades trying to fix: first, that our computer crime laws are so poorly written and broadly interpreted that they allow for outrageous misuses of police, prosecutorial and judicial resources; and second, that police continue to overstate the reliability of IP addresses as a means of identifying people or locations.

All too often, misunderstandings about computers and the digital networks lead to gross miscarriages of justice.

On the first point, it seems that the police asked for, the prosecutors sought, (and the Court granted) a warrant for a home raid by state police in response to a text message sent to a group of governmental and nongovernmental people working on tracking COVID, urging members to speak up about government hiding and manipulating information about the COVID outbreak in Florida.

This isnt just a one-off misuse: in other cases, weve seen the criminalization of unauthorized access used to threaten security researchers who investigate the tools we all rely on, prosecute a mother for impersonating her daughter on a social network, threaten journalists seeking to scrape Facebook to figure out what it is doing with our data, and prosecute employees who did disloyal things on company computers. Unauthorized access was also used to prosecute our friend Aaron Swartz, and threaten him with decades in jail for downloading academic articles from the JSTOR database. Facing such threats, he committed suicide. How could a text message urging people to do the right thing ever result in an armed police home raid? Sadly, the answer lies in the vagueness and overbreadth of the Florida Computer Crime law, which closely mirrors the language in the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (laws in many states across the country are likewise based on the CFAA).

Police all too often liken an IP address to a fingerprint"

The law makes it a crime a serious felony - to have unauthorized access to a computer. But it doesnt define what unauthorized means. In cases across the country, and in one currently pending before the U.S. Supreme court called Van Buren, weve seen that the lack of a clear definition and boundaries around the word authorized causes great harm. Here, based upon the Affidavit in the Rebekah Jones case, the police took the position that sending a single text message to a group that you are not (or are no longer) a part of is unauthorized access to a computer and so is a crime that merits an armed home police raid. This, despite the obvious fact that no harm happened as a result of people getting a single message urging them to do the right thing.

In fact, if youve ever shared a password with a family member or asked someone else to log into a service on your behalf or even lied about your age on a dating website, youve likely engaged in unauthorized access under some court interpretations. We urged the Supreme Court in the Van Buren case to rule that violations of terms of use (as opposed to overcoming technical blocks) can never be criminal CFAA violations. This wont entirely fix the law, but it will take away some of the most egregious misuses.

This case confirms our serious, ongoing national failure to protect whistleblowers.

Even with the broader definition of unauthorized, though, its unclear whether the text message in question was criminal. The Affidavit from the police confirms that the text group shared a single user name and password and some have even said that the credentials were publicly available. Either way, its hard to see how the text could have been unauthorized if there was no technical or other notice to Ms. Jones that sending a message to the list was not allowed. Yet this wafer-thin reed was accepted by a Court as a basis for a search warrant of Ms. Jones family home.

On the second point, the Affidavit indicates that the police relied heavily on the IP address of the sender of the message to seek a warrant to send armed police to Ms. Jones home. The affidavit fails to state how the police were able to connect the IP address with the physical address, simply stating that they used investigative resources. Press reports claim that Comcast the ISP that handled that IP address - did confirm that Ms. Jones home was the customer associated with the IP address, but that isn't stated in the Affidavit. In other cases, the use of notoriously imprecise public reverse IP lookup tools has resulted in raids of the wrong homes, sometimes multiple times, so it is important that the police explain to the Court what they did to confirm the address and not just hide behind investigative sources.

EFF has long warned that the overreliance on IP addresses as a basis for either the identity or location of a suspect is dangerous. Police all too often liken an IP address to a fingerprint, a misleading comparison that suggests that IP-based identifications are much more reliable than they really are, making the metaphor a dangerous one. The metaphor really falls apart when you consider the reality that a single IP address used by a home network is usually providing Internet connectivity to multiple people with several different digital devices, making it difficult to pinpoint a particular individual. Here, the police did tell the court that that Ms. Jones had recently worked for the Florida Department of Health, so the IP address wasnt the only fact before the court, but its still pretty thin for a home invasion warrant, rather than, say, a simple police request that Ms. Jones come in for questioning.

Even if it turns out Florida police were correct in this case and for now Ms. Jones has denied sending the text the rest of us should be concerned that IP addresses alone, combined with some undisclosed investigative resources can be the basis for a judge allowing armed police into your home. And it shows that judges must scrutinize both IP address evidence and law enforcement claims about their reliability, along with other supporting evidence, before authorizing search warrants.

This case confirms our serious, ongoing national failure to protect whistleblowers. And in this case - as with Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning and many others - its clear that part of protecting whistleblowers means updating our computer crime laws to ensure that they can't be used as ready tools for prosecutorial overreach and misconduct. We also need to continue to educate judges about the unreliability of IP addresses so they require more information than just vague conclusions from police before granting search warrants.

All too often, misunderstandings about computers and the digital networks lead to gross miscarriages of justice. But computers and the Internet are here to stay. Its long past time we ensured that our criminal laws and processes stopped relying on outdated and imprecise words like authorized and metaphors like fingerprints, and instead apply technical rigor when deliberating about technology.

Read more here:
Raid on COVID Whistleblower in Florida Shows the Need to Reform Overbroad Computer Crime Laws and the Risks of Over-Reliance on IP Addresses - EFF

Curious minds deserve insightful books, and there was no shortage of excellent titles this year. Here is the Monitors list of superlative nonfiction books published in 2020, from histories to memoirs and everything in between.

Casteby Isabel Wilkerson

In her stirring follow-up to The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson persuasively argues that racism alone does not explain Americas social divisions. Rather, the United States ought to be understood as having a race-based caste system, one whose hierarchies, though artificial, are remarkably enduring.

Demagogueby Larry Tye

Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 597 pp.

Bestselling biographer Larry Tye writes a long and comprehensive biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the polarizing spearhead of the Red Scare of the 1950s and Tye contends the origin of some disturbing features in our 21st-century political landscape.

Warholby Blake Gopnik

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes, Andy Warhol is credited with saying. But there is nothing fleeting about his legacy as an artist, filmmaker, and self-created pop-culture phenomenon. His life and work are examined in detail in Blake Gopniks biography. Warhol devotees will rejoice, and more casual readers will receive an education in all things Andy.

Unionby Colin Woodard

Colin Woodard tells not the story of how America became a nation, but rather of how America crafted its own version of its national history, and how that national mythology has changed over the decades.

Stories of the Saharaby Sanmao

Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated from the Chinese by Mike Fu, Bloomsbury, 416 pp.

As a Chinese woman born in 1943, Sanmao was a pioneering global citizen. These 20 essays about living in one of the harshest areas of the world in the 1970s are testimony to her audacity and courage.

Just Usby Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine follows her prize-winning Citizen: An American Lyric with a brilliant and timely examination of whiteness in America. This consciousness-raising, bravura combination of personal essays, poems, photographs, and cultural commentary works on so many levels and is a skyscraper in the literature on racism.

Dark Mirrorby Barton Gellman

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman writes an insider account of the breaking of Edward Snowdens story and its wider implications for the modern world, all told in prose as gripping as a spy thriller.

Cross of Snowby Nicholas A. Basbanes

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas A. Basbanes, Alfred A. Knopf, 465 pp.

The poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow arent in fashion today, but in the first major biography of the fabled New England poet in many years, Nicholas A. Basbanes argues that Longfellow is making a comeback. His exhaustively researched account of Longfellows career should give that reappraisal a boost.

Becoming Wildby Carl Safina

Carl Safina looks at three species the sperm whale, the scarlet macaw, and the chimpanzee to chart all the ways they build and sustain their societies. He explores how those cultures echo and differ from our own.

The Golden Threadby Ravi Somaiya

U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjld was negotiating an end to the Congolese civil war when he died in a plane crash in 1961. To this day, many believe he was assassinated. Journalist Ravi Somaiya explores one of the most compelling mysteries of the Cold War in this grim and absorbing book.

Abeby David S. Reynolds

Abraham Lincoln had less than a year of formal education; he has often been portrayed as inexperienced and unprepared to lead. David S. Reynolds monumental, reverential biography rejects that narrative, arguing that Lincolns immersion in the high and low culture of 19th-century America, along with his deep moral convictions, equipped him to steer the Union through the Civil War.

Eleanorby David Michaelis

This riveting, cinematic biography of Americas longest-serving first lady spans Eleanor Roosevelts lonely childhood, her frosty marriage to FDR, their White House years, her intimate relationships outside their marriage, and her widowhood, during which she became an advocate for human rights.

Veritasby Ariel Sabar

Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar, Doubleday, 416 pp.

In 2012, a religion scholar announced a discovery: an ancient papyrus fragment that suggested that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene may have been married. Expanding on his 2016 article for The Atlantic, Ariel Sabar digs into the story of the papyrus and the couple who tried to pass it off as real.

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The Adventurers Sonby Roman Dial

Renowned biologist and explorer Roman Dial searches for his 27-year-old son, who has gone missing in the jungles of Costa Rica. Part memoir, part mystery, The Adventurers Son is a story of a fathers love for his son, and for the natural world.

Excerpt from:
The best nonfiction books of 2020 offer wisdom and insight - Christian Science Monitor

By far the greatest beneficiary of the whistleblower revolution is the Western Balkans. This region, where budding democracies are struggling to succeed in the wake of the Communist era, may seem an unlikely place for whistleblower rights to be advancing. It is actually because of this struggle that these rights are being strengthened more than in any other region in the world.

Every Western Balkan country now has in place a whistleblower protection law that meets most European and international standards. All of these laws have been passed since 2013, thanks to the hard work of activists, journalists and elected officials, and with support from the EU, the Council of Europe and the UN. This wave of new laws began in Bosnia and Herzegovina in December 2013 six months after Snowden went public with details of mass surveillance by US spy agencies.

With these laws now in place, every country in the region has set up an official system to receive, investigate and act on whistleblower reports and retaliation complaints. Most of these systems are overseen by anti-corruption agencies and ombudsman offices, which already have experience investigating crimes and protecting civil rights. Most of the agencies have whistleblower hotlines, specially trained staff and designated budgets.

We are pleased to report that in Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, these systems are starting to function rather well. In all of these countries, employees who reported crime or corruption have been protected from retaliation, in one fashion or another. Officials have developed a high level of expertise in whistleblower protection concepts and procedures, and are working on behalf of citizens.

These new laws and systems are not perfect. Some gaps and shortcomings are limiting the ability of officials to investigate cases and grant stronger protections. But the initial results are very positive. This is particularly true in light of the fact that with the exception of South Korea, the US and a very few other countries, well-functioning systems are largely absent.

Out of a justified concern for the whistleblowers, and to protect their identity and all of their identifying information, we are not at liberty to release any details of these recent cases. In the future we hope to report some details in order to highlight these important successes, while preserving confidentiality of the citizens.

Read this article:
Southeast Europe is Pioneering a Global 'Whistleblower Revolution' - Balkan Insight

Theres no denying that the past 100 years have been a transformative time for the entire world, but particularly for the United States as a nation. With the two major political parties established, the country cast their votes in more than 25 elections, leading to the election of the first African American president and the first female vice presidentwho is also the first person of color to be elected to that role.

It was also a century of war, as the United States entered into World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Iraq War, to name a few. While the armed forces were finally desegregated, the cost and bloodshed associated with what many citizens deemed to be unnecessary endeavors led to strong antiwar protests that challenged Americans views of the countrys military entanglements.

National alliances grew and changed, with the United States entering NATO and engaging in a prolonged conflict with the Soviet Union and other potentially communist enemies.

While it has been a century tinged with hardship and strife, the United States has also seen a huge wave of social activism, as communities of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community fought to pass legislation that would truly grant Americans equal opportunity under the lawfrom the Civil Rights Act to the case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized gay marriage across the country.

To put these changes into perspective, Stacker compiled a list of notable U.S. political occurrences from the past century from a variety of news articles, nonprofits, government pages, and historical records. From Warren G. Hardings election as the United States 29th president in 1921 to Joe Bidens election as the United States 46th president in 2020, read on to find out what was happening in American politics during the year you were born.

You may also like: States that have accepted the most refugees in the past decade

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US political history from the year you were born - Bryan-College Station Eagle

On November 16, the case of Bilal Abdul Kareem came on for argument before the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. The claim made by the Trump administration and accepted by the federal judge in September 2019 was that the US government could assassinate Bilal with a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. Because this was a matter of national security, neither Kareem nor the Supreme Court of the United States should have any say in the matter.

Reprieve, the organisation of lawyers fighting state-sponsored human rights abuses, and the pro bono DC firm of Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss originally brought the case on behalf of two people Kareem and Al Jazeera journalist Ahmad Zaidan. Kareem was brought up in New York by a mother dedicated to civil rights and, after wandering the stand-up comedian circuit for a while, he found his faith in Islam, and decided to stand up for the rights of Muslims in Syria as a war journalist. Zaidan was already in the media business, as Al Jazeeras Islamabad bureau chief, and he secured some scoops all the way up to Osama bin Laden. As a result of this, he was falsely labelled a member of al-Qaeda by the CIA, which we learned from documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

The federal judge dismissed Zaidans case in her original order in 2018 as he had returned from Pakistan to Doha, and was not deemed realistically to be in fear of death. But, originally, the judge ruled in favour of Kareem, finding that this Black American had plausibly shown that his own government was trying to murder him. It was not clear why Kareem merited execution that was the CIAs secret. Perhaps they had tracked his movements to his interviews and did not like him broadcasting the views of a broad range of people involved in the Syrian civil war.

One matter was clear: on five occasions he had narrowly avoided death. His office building had been hit twice, and the US owed him for two vehicles they had apparently blown up moments after he had got out of them. He found it hard to believe when the first strike came but, by the fifth, he was sure his own country wanted him dead. After all, at the time the US was the only country deploying weaponised drones in the region.

This is, ultimately, a case of President Barack Obamas chickens coming home to roost in President Donald Trumps White House. Obama was the one who ramped up the execution without trial as a bizarre replacement for detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

He set no limit to where those deemed to be terrorists might be targeted. We would, he writes in his latest book, A Promised Land, hunt down terrorist suspects mostly inside but sometimes outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he did not actually limit this to terrorists: in 2009, inexorably, the kill list began to include drug dealers. Why not? We had a War on Drugs long before the War on Terror. President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines was allegedly responsible for 7,000 deaths of drug dealers in his first year in office and bragged that he had personally murdered a drug dealer. He deems the scourge of narcotics to be far more damaging to his society than terrorism.

It did not take long for the US Drug Enforcement Agency to argue that the Taliban was being funded by the Afghan heroin trade and this rapidly led to another euphemistic kill list (the Joint Prioritized Effects List, leaked by Edward Snowden), including drug dealers for elimination.

Imagine Donald Trumps excitement when he inherited this power. Now, in the waning days of his presidency, the lawyers in his Department of Justice are taking the Obama doctrine to its logical extreme. All Kareem wanted was an assurance that his government would not try to kill him again, which might not sound like much of an ask. But it was a bridge too far for Trumps lawyers when it came to the appeal in the District of Columbia. They announced that any fact related to who the president might wish to assassinate was top secret and they demanded that the judge respect a bright line national security privilege that, they insisted, allowed them to do what they like, when they like, with no oversight from the courts or anyone else. Horrifyingly, the federal judge agreed.

Obviously, we appealed to try to set the record straight. The judges on the federal appeals court seemed shocked, too, by the scope of Trumps power grab. Yet the government lawyer pushed even further. Not only is this a matter of national security, he argued, but any White House plan to murder Kareem is also an unreviewable political question. One judge demanded to know whether Trump claimed the unfettered power to assassinate her as well, perhaps sitting at her desk in the DC Circuit Courthouse.

Theres no difference between me and Kareem?she demanded of the government lawyer, incredulous. You would still argue political question just as you do here. And you would argue state secrets just as you do here. And if we rule for you, that means Im hosed. Nothing I can do about this death sentence.

If your question is: Can a court, once the [political or national security] privilege is properly invoked, the Trump lawyer replied, after some waffling, in that circumstance, the answer is no. In other words, the Trump administration was asserting that there was no difference, in principle, between killing Kareem in Idlib, Syria, and killing the judge in her office in Washington, DC.

This was no academic discussion, but a power grab made by a president who still refuses to admit that the vote went against him, and a Tyrannosaurus rex in its death throes can be very dangerous.

Do you appreciate how extraordinary that proposition is? exclaimed the incredulous jurist. That the US Government the executive branch [the president] can unilaterally decide to kill US citizens?

Perhaps I should not be writing this article. It might give Trump ideas, as he stews in the West Wing between his post-election rounds of golf. After all, under his theory he would not be limited to killing judges the same principle would apply to the patently political question of whether an opposition politician is a threat to national security (which, in Trumps case, is often conflated with Trump security). So, rather than waste time on frivolous law suits challenging the votes in Pennsylvania, why not just send a Predator drone to seek out Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

Trump would only be plagiarising the plans of one of his close friends. The consensus of Western intelligenceis that the order to kill Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny came directly from the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin appears to have taken the view that political opponents are, indeed, a threat to national security.

Trump is not going to do that (one must hope!) but when the US abandons the high ground, it prompts everyone to dive into the depths. The argument made by Trumps lawyer will allow Putin to tell Biden to back off if he complains about attempts to murder political opponents from Salisbury to Istanbul just as Obamas kill list prompted Duterte to tellthe former president to go to hell in a call about the drug assassinations. There has been much talk of an American descent into despotism under Trump. Perhaps our institutions are strong enough to withstand a direct assault. Perhaps the greater danger comes from an insidious grasp of extraordinary power.

Perhaps, indeed,the revelation that President Obama, operating off a government kill list, has been personally directing who should be targeted for death by military drones merely pushes us that much closer to that precipitous drop-off to authoritarianism. If so, we must remember the famous words of Edmund Burke: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing. Obamas initial insistence on the right to dispense with the right to a trial before execution is one of the most dangerous steps we have taken towards the cliff edge.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

Read this article:
Why should the US be afforded the power of assassination? - Al Jazeera English

The House on Wednesday voted 343-67 to approve a weeklong extension of government-funding negotiations as lawmakers continued to tussle over key details of a COVID-19 stimulus package.

The Senate is expected to approve the deadline extension on Thursday - averting a government shutdown on Friday.

Mnuchin announced the White House proposal just over a week after the bipartisan group unveiled its plan, and just as the bipartisan plan was gaining momentum on both sides of the aisle.

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But there are significant disagreements to be resolved in the bipartisan proposal.

Negotiators have indicated that an agreement in time is still possible.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat behind the bipartisan negotiations, told The New York Times that the group would "be working around the clock until we solve the liability and worker protection issue."

Gottheimer also told CBS News, "We are literally on the five-yard line now."

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican also involved in the bipartisan talks, told The Times, "We are still working together on this," adding that "the possibilities are there to resolve this and to resolve this in a way that makes sense and gains support."

Original post:
The House approved a one-week extension to government funding, as the bipartisan group behind the $908 billion - Business Insider India

An exchange of letters published on Thursday by the New York Times shows that the FBI has been using provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act to secretly collect information about visitors to specific US-based websites.

The three lettersone from Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon, and two from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffediscuss details of the permissions granted to the FBI under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, originally passed in the period following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

According to the original terms of Section 215, the government must apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to gain access to tangible materials that assist in an investigation of international terrorism or other clandestine intelligence activities. The law specifically bars use of its provisions on US citizens.

However, following the revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013 that the US government was conducting unfettered electronic surveillance of everyone, Section 215 was reviewed and modified. In 2015, the new USA Freedom Act was voted on by Congress and signed by President Obama and all claimed that the illegal bulk data collection programs had been stopped even though the basic structure of Section 215 remained in place.

The letters between Wyden and Ratcliffe, which began in May of this year during congressional efforts to renew Section 215, show that the secret data collection activities of US law enforcement and intelligence have actually never stopped.

After the Senate voted 80 to 16 to extend the mechanisms that permit the US government to spy on people, including their internet browsing activity, Senator Wyden wrote to Ratcliffe asking a series of questions to clarify how US intelligence was monitoring the web search activity of a single targeted individual without also gathering information on others.

For example, Wyden asked, If the target or unique identifier is an IP address, would the government differentiate among multiple individuals using the same IP address, such as family members and roommates using the same Wi-Fi network, or could numerous users appear as a single target or unique identifier?

In electronic surveillance, a unique identifier is a mobile phone number or an email address connected with a specific individual or organization. While an Internet Protocol (IP) address is unique to a specific computer or node on the internet, it is more difficult to associate it with a specific user or person because IP addresses are frequently dynamically assigned by routers and other internet hardware and may be associated with more than a single individual user.

In his reply of November 6 (more than five months later), Ratcliffe wrote that Section 215 was not being used to collect internet search records. He also went on to disclose that in 2019 there were 61 orders issued last year under FISC involving and none of them, resulted in the production of any information regarding web browsing or internet searches.

However, according to the New York Times report, the paper pressed Ratcliffe and the FBI to clarify whether it was defining web browsing activity to encompass logging all visitors to a particular website, in addition to a particular persons browsing among different sites. The Times wrote that the next day, the Justice Department sent a clarification to Mr. Ratcliffes office, according to a follow-up letter he sent to Mr. Wyden on Nov. 25.

The second letter from Ratcliffe states that in fact one of the 61 orders, directed the production of log entries for a single, identified U.S. web page reflecting connections from IP addresses registered in a specified foreign country that occurred during a defined period of time.

In acknowledging his error, Ratcliffe wrote, I regret that this additional information was not included in my earlier letter. I have directed my staff to consult with the Department of Justice and advise me of any necessary corrective action, to include any amendments to information previously reported in the Annual Statistical Transparency Report required under Section 603 of the FISA.

Ratcliffe asking the Trump Justice Department to advise him of any necessary corrective action on the matter of the governments illegal gathering of electronic communications and data is absurd on its face. Attorney General William Barr is the godfather of the US governments bulk data collection program having helped to build the precursor to the present National Security Agency system while he served in the administration of George H. W. Bush in 1992.

Barr worked with his then-deputy Robert Mueller to erect a program under the direction of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that ordered the telecom companies to turn over the records of all phone calls from the US to countries labeled as centers of drug trafficking. This platform was used as the foundation of the PATRIOT Acts mass surveillance operation.

While the purpose of the New York Times report and release of the letters is to bolster the claim that the administration of President elect Joe Biden is preparing to revisit the ongoing violations of constitutionally protected rights against unreasonable searches and seizures embodied in the secret surveillance programs, no defense of democratic principles is forthcoming from the Democrats.

Far from it, the report in the Times shows that the blatant defenders of intelligence state surveillance within the Democratic Party worked with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi earlier this year to prevent Section 215 from being directly challenged in the House of Representatives. Pelosi worked with Representative Adam Schiff of California to water down language in an amendment from Representative Zoe Lofgren, also from California, that would bar the use of Section 215 to collect web browsing and search data.

The Times report says, While privacy advocates initially supported the compromise, they withdrew their backing after Mr. Schiff put forward an interpretation suggesting that it would leave the government, while investigating foreign threats, able to gather Americans data as long as that was not its specific intention.

The disingenuous maneuvering by the Democrats then opened the door for President Trump to intervene and posture about being against secret government surveillance, but only in relation to the Mueller investigation into the his campaigns supposed collaboration with the asserted but never proven Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

The Times report concludes, With support bleeding away from both the left and right flanks, Ms. Pelosi punted and sent the legislation to a House-Senate conference committee for further negotiations. ... permitting Section 215 to remain lapsed until negotiations resumed under a new president. Nothing different will come from a Biden-Harris administration.

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FBI gathered US website visitor logs under the post-9/11 PATRIOT Act - WSWS