ACLU COMMENT ON SENATE VOTE TO ALLOW INTERNET PROVIDERS TO SELL CONSUMER DATA
March 23, 2017
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted today to pass a resolution that would overturn a Federal Communications Commission rule that requires internet service providers to get customers’ permission before they sell sensitive consumer data, such as browsing history. Passage of the resolution by Congress could prevent the FCC from issuing rules that are substantially the same in the future.
ACLU Legislative Counsel Neema Singh Guliani issued the following statement:
“It is extremely disappointing that the Senate voted today to sacrifice the privacy rights of Americans in the interest of protecting the profits of major internet companies, including Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. The resolution would undo privacy rules that ensure consumers control how their most sensitive information is used. The House must now stop this resolution from moving forward and stand up for our privacy rights.”
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Related story
Trump And Congress Complain About Surveillance, But Want to Enable Spying By Internet Companies
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project
MARCH 14, 2017
This piece originally appeared in The Hill.
President Trump and some of his supporters on Capitol Hill have recently been expressing anxiety over the possibility of politically motivated surveillance and leaks by our intelligence agencies. But ironically, at the very same time they are moving to give our nation’s largest Internet telecommunications companies even more power to share their customers’ data, including with the government, without permission. Indeed, some of the most ardent critics of government surveillance — including Senator Paul, Senator Cruz, and Senator Heller — are among those leading the charge to roll back rules that would prevent such abuses by companies.
While the NSA can listen to Americans’ communications with Russian government officials and the FBI can listen to conversations when they have an order from a judge, our Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can monitor almost everything we do online. Increasingly, that’s a big part of everything we do, period. Yet Trump and his allies appear to want to open the way for much of that information to be sold or even given away to government agencies, political rivals, or anyone else whenever they want — no permission necessary.
For hundreds of years countries around the world have provided special privacy protections for communications, whether that is the mail, telegraphs, or the telephone system. In the United States the reason the phone company can’t listen in to our telephone calls is that we have a law (Section 222 of the Communications Act) that bars them from doing so. Last year, the FCC moved to expand that privacy protection from telephones to the Internet. Yet Trump has nominated as his FCC chair Ajit Pai, a man who has promised to reverse those privacy protections, and 23 senators have co-sponsored a resolution that would apply the Congressional Review Act to them — not only wiping away Americans’ privacy protections, but barring the FCC from drafting any new rules that are “substantially the same.”
When good protections are lacking, abuses do occur. During the 1876 presidential election, for example, at a time the new communications technology of the telegram was not covered by any privacy laws, Western Union secretly disclosed to Republican operatives telegrams between southern Democrats and their northern counterparts during a battle over disputed election results.
In 1987, a local newspaper obtained and published Robert Bork’s video rental records while he was being considered by the Senate for confirmation to the Supreme Court. Though this was a time when video stores were a primary means of accessing pornography, his rental records turned out to contain nothing racy. Still, members of Congress were apparently greatly concerned by this development and hurriedly enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act, a set of protections that are unusually strong within American privacy law. Members of Congress recognized that the absence of privacy protections (which would permit, for example, disclosure of an adult-video rental) would probably be much more threatening to them than to the average American. And while there are many ways that similar privacy invasions by Internet providers could be used to hurt many Americans, the same holds true with regards to Internet usage.
Without the FCC rules that opponents want to undo, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and other Internet providers could sell or give away sensitive information about how any of their customers are using the Internet. The data they can collect includes every website visited, the time and amount of Internet usage, and in some cases even locations.
More:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/trump-and-congress-complain-about-surveillance-want-enable-spying-internet
= new reply since forum marked as read
Knowing you that doesn't surprise me at all. 
The ACLU is going to need every penny to fight Twitler and so far Americans have come through in a big way.
By Katie Mettler
January 30, 2017 at 6:08 AM
In the weeks after the Nov. 8 election, when Donald Trump secured a surprise victory to become president of the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union received so much money in online donations — more than $15 million — that an official with the 100-year-old organization called the flood “unprecedented in our history.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/01/30/the-aclu-says-it-got-24-million-in-donations-this-weekend-six-times-its-yearly-average/
What else do you know about me that I should be worried about???
I just joined maybe a couple months ago when I made my first donation ever...
But I didn't get that from the spies in your television or cameras in your microwave.
imagine a smiling violinist, though..
