Patriot Act amendment needing a warrant for browsing history fails

I remember listening to a podcast where some guy was describing how the FBI (I think?) had a map of the 5 most frequently contacted phone number and the average rate of contact for those numbers for all landline and cellphone users in the early 2000s.

They were able to de-anonymize burner phones by mapping what numbers they were contacting, who those numbers were contacting and who the 2nd hop numbers were contacting.

Given that this was the technology 2 decades ago, I’m going to guess that similar behavioral fingerprints have been collected for all sorts of data. I wonder if it’s possible to fingerprint someone from the frequency of the top 5 websites someone visits and the time at which they are most actively browsing a website.

Edit: I found the podcast from my notes. Episode 265 of the James Altucher Show

But to stay on topic, reading this article is clearly also terrorism, since only a minority(+) of congress disagrees.

(+) “minority” has apparently been redefined to be 60-66% whenever the goal is to stop congress from doing something reprehensible.

Perhaps it's because Section 215 is already expired and Sanders doesn't plan to vote for its renewal, so he doesn't see a point in voting for an amendment that makes said renewal more likely to pass?

Don't take that for actual closeness. In many votes including this one, Senators may want to vote against leadership but will only do so if permitted. So if, say, 5 more Democrats had insisted on voting yes to make the amendment pass, McConnell would have told 5 more Republicans that they were disallowed from voting against it, and the amendment would have failed by... one vote.

The dynamic here is that Republican politicians often want to present themselves to constituents as being against the police state or big government, but the party/party leadership wants to pass measures such as this. So the individual politicians are accommodated to the extent that they don't interfere with the party passing what it wants.

You see a similar dynamic in quite a lot of votes.

TL;DR: McConnell knows how to count.

As new technologies emerge and proliferate, they'll inevitably be used by criminals to harm citizens, businesses, and the local community. I can tell you firsthand (at least for murderers in Chicago, where I work as a crime analyst), encryption definitely helps killers get away with murder (based on the number of incriminating texts I've seen in instances where, with legal authorization (ie a search warrant approved by a judge), it's been possible to access an unwilling suspect's phone).

I'm not arguing that we should get rid of encryption, (nor am I saying it's even possible to defeat encryption at scale, so it was probably a bad example to go with when call detail records would have been better, but I should really be working right now), rather, I'm saying we should let law enforcement keep up with the level of technology, but we should have strong auditing processes and don't allow for situations like the FISA/FISC situation where proceedings are nearly always literally one-sided (only prosecution, defense is necessarily excluded from the proceeding) [0].

New powers will be required to deal with new situations. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, for example, has killed more Chicagoans in the past 2 months than homicide has in the past 3 years, and that is also ravaging the economy as people are correctly afraid of going out in public. Currently most people are isolating because we don't have a more precise way of separating the infected from the uninfected, but China's digital contact tracing QR-code scheme provides a much more precise separator (and per an episode of This American Life [1] that I just listened to, it actually made at least the interviewee more comfortable being in public because they knew infected or risky people were separated out). If legislators implemented very tight controls over who could use the data (and how) and there was (sufficiently) transparent and rigorous auditing, we could save lives, jobs, and businesses. I know the public won't go for it because the public justifiably doesn't trust the government to prevent abuse of this system, but I would love to live in a world where we could develop and deploy technical solutions to major problems and be confident that the technical solution would not be abused.

[0] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol72/iss3/4/

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/698/transcript