Although several lawmakers have expressed their disgust and outrage at the far-reaching scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices, one Kansas lawmaker has taken his dissatisfaction a step further and created a law that would protect his constituents “against the prying eyes of Big Brother.”
Kansas State Republican Rep. Brett Hildabrand hasn’t officially introduced the legislation known as the “Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act” yet, since the Kansas state legislature is in recess until January, but on Tuesday Hildabrand issued a teaser of the bill on his Facebook page.
Under Hildabrand’s bill, unless federal authorities obtain a warrant, court order, or there is an emergency situation, “all local and state governments are prohibited from possessing or attempting to possess information relating to an individual or group of individuals held by a third-party in a system of records; and no such information shall be subject to discovery, subpoena or other means of legal compulsion for its release to any person or entity or be admissible in evidence in any judicial or administrative proceeding.”
In other words, state and local agencies in Kansas would be prohibited from searching or obtaining any personal information from an individual’s cell phone content, email, and nonpublic social media information without first obtaining a warrant.
Hildabrand said that because not all organizations treat emails, social media, and other digital information with the same search and seizure protections as provided under the Fourth Amendment as a person’s mailbox, he wants to ensure that in the future all electronic property is protected.
“There’s good court cases involving physical mail, physical property, but as electronic data and technology advances there might not be a lot of good case law on that, so that was part of my intention with this is to shore up protections for electronic media,” he said.
The Representative expressed concerns that some law enforcement agencies were teaming up with Internet companies such as Google to obtain information on an individual, and said he found this concerning because “You’re essentially assuming a guilty populace in storing that info until you can confirm they’re guilty.”
The bill has received support from several of Hildabrand’s libertarian-leaning colleagues, as well as some Democratic members of the Kansas state Senate and House.
Although Kansas is one state that didn’t suffer the wrath of the NSA’s invasive surveillance practice as much as other states, Hildabrand said he wants to introduce the bill to make sure it stays that way.
Although Kansas alone likely doesn’t have the power to stop the NSA from gathering intelligence, a blog post on the 10th Amendment Center’s website applauded Hildabrand’s bill and said that passage of similar laws “will reduce the negative impact of that data collection by banning its use in some of the most significant ways the federal government is trying to use it in practice.
“Coupled with state-legislation to ban resource sharing in other states where NSA data centers and other locations exist (such as Utah, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Maryland, Colorado, Washington, Hawaii, and West Virginia), plus those states (all but seven) which have university partnerships with NSA, passage in multiple will have a significant impact the NSA’s ability to carry out what it refers to as its ‘critical mission.’”
Federal implications
Even if Kansas lawmakers do decide to pass the “Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act” early next year, there is no guarantee that the legislation would prevent the federal government from accessing some of the information.
Currently at least two other states — Texas and Montana — have legislation that limits the government’s ability to use electronic devices to spy on residents and access electronic information from cellphones, laptops and tablets, but the limitations don’t apply to some federal laws such as the Patriot Act.
In Montana, Rep. Daniel Zolnikov (R-Billings), the author of the state’s anti-spying legislation, said that he initially tried to include language in the bill that would bar the federal government from accessing information without a warrant, but that had to be removed since the supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution says federal law overrides state law in cases where they conflict.
“It was pretty much big business versus me, and they don’t want privacy,” Zolnikov said. “I’m all for people’s rights not being sold to the highest bidder.”