Senator calls for the public release of AT&T 'Hemisphere' surveillance records

Excellent and very WISE observation. Why, oh why, do people in charge never consider the Law of Unintended Consequences?

We learned this lesson the hard way when China stole a ton of military members' personal info.

Unfortunately, Bernie talks the talk, but has failed to walk the walk in recent years. For example, congress was within one vote from passing a law that would require warrants for surveillance and missed it because Sanders wasn't there to vote.

The Senate on Thursday took up a key bill to reauthorize domestic surveillance programs while making changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with several substantial amendments on the line. One of the amendments, introduced by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Republican Sen. Steve Daines, would have required authorities to obtain a warrant to access internet users’ search histories and browsing information. Uh, yes, pass that??

The amendment, however, met an extremely Senate grave: It “failed” with 59 yeas to 37 nays, one short of the 60-vote threshold it needed to overcome the streamlined vestigial filibuster. The splits didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: 24 Republicans voted for it, while 10 Democrats voted against it. (Would you like to see the names of the Democrats who voted against it? Their names are: Tom Carper, Bob Casey, Dianne Feinstein, Maggie Hassan, Doug Jones, Tim Kaine, Joe Manchin, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Warner, and Sheldon Whitehouse.)

Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/bernie-sanders-a...

Against all abortion, against the Paris Agreement, and pro Tea Party.

If it does, prosecution has a few tools at their disposal. They can seal the records, justified as protecting "ways and means", they can also just decide ahead of time not to bring charges until such time as there is a successful route through which to execute a parallel construction.

The biggest issue, in a sense, isn't that defense attorneys aren't able to challenge these devices use, but that prosecutors are not slamming law enforcement for unlawful use. They aren't incentivized to in any way except by meing a radical proponent for judicial as systemic integrity. Such a personality characteristiv is not going to endear one sufficiently to law enforcement enough to likely even be informed that a case may have had less-than-legal investigatory methods employed.

Literally the only realistic way to catch these types of abuses is to essentially assume they happen, and dedicate adversarial resources with relative-to-Law-Enforcement level privileged access to the means to investigate law enforcers.

I.e. Internal Affairs/an Inspector General like construct.

In practice, however, any system that implements such a thing still has levers that can be applied to sufficiently frustrate the efforts of said groups to render it of questionable efficacy.