Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) have introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act, a bill that feels like someone took the Fourth Amendment and actually meant it.

The legislation aims “to ensure that all searches that significantly impinge on the privacy or security of a person require a warrant based on probable cause” and to create “a right of action for violations of Fourth Amendment rights.” That covers the kinds of searches federal agencies currently conduct without judicial oversight: pulling your financial records from banks, requesting your browsing history from ISPs, buying your location data from brokers, and harvesting your biometric information from surveillance cameras.

We obtained a copy of the bill for youhere.

The bill lands in the middle of a brutal Congressional fight overFISA Section 702, the surveillance authority that currentlylets the FBI search Americans’ communications.

The new legislation goes much further than the various reform bills circulating around that debate. Where theSAFE Actand theGovernment Surveillance Reform Acttarget specific loopholes in FISA, the Surveillance Accountability Act tries to close all of them at once by rewriting the baseline rule: if the government wants your data, it needs a judge’s permission.

More:How Your Weather App Became a Surveillance Machine — and How to Escape It

The main part of the bill adds a new Section 3119 to Title 18 of the US Code with a simple default: “no search may be conducted without a warrant issued by a neutral and detached magistrate upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”

The bill defines “search” broadly enough to actually matter, covering “any government-initiated act that intrudes upon an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy,” whether through “human, digital, or automated means.” It explicitly lists what falls under warrant protection: “communications,” “associations,” “employment,” “social media usage,” “internet usage,” “financial transactions,” and “travel.”

The bill goes further, extending protection to “the acquisition and analysis of any data, metadata, or information pertaining to a person’s digital or physical life,” including “geolocation,” “personal device activity,” “biometric identifiers,” and “behavioral signals data.”

The government is already collecting and analyzing patterns of how you act online, and Massie and Boebert’s bill is the first piece of legislation to name it directly and bring it under warrant protection.

Source: Infowars: There's a War on For Your Mind!