Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has blocked an effort to pass legislation that would have extended data privacy protections for federal lawmakers and public officials to everyone in the United States.
On Monday night, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked the U.S. Senate for unanimous consent from fellow senators to pass his legislation, S.2850, or Protecting Americans from Doxing and Political Violence Act.
Wyden’s bill, if passed, would have taken bipartisan-passed provisions designed to protect government officials, lawmakers, and their families from having their personal information sold or traded by data brokers, and extend them to every American and person living in the United States.
“Members of Congress should not receive special treatment,” Wyden said on the Senate floor. “Our constituents deserve protection from violence, stalking, and other criminal threats.”
“Protecting everyone is the most effective way to protect U.S. military and intelligence personnel, including undercover officers,” Wyden added, per the congressional record.
Data brokers are part of a worldwide multibillion-dollar industry of companies that profit from hoarding and selling access to huge amounts of Americans’ personal, financial, and granular location information, often collected from phones and other devices connected to the internet. This data gets sold, including to governments, which don’t need a warrant for commercially obtainable data.
The collection of huge banks of data also comes with its own risks, including security lapses and data breaches. Information bought by data brokers has been used to dox people, and in recent cases is linked to the shooting of two Minnesota state lawmakers, one of whom died. The killer allegedly obtained their home addresses from data brokers.
Cruz was the sole objecting senator to Wyden’s bill, claiming without evidence that the bill could disrupt law enforcement, “such as knowing where sexual predators are living.”
Daniel Schuman, the executive director at the non-profit American Governance Institute, told TechCrunch that Cruz’s claim was “wrong” and that federal law already requires a publicly available registry of sex offenders.
“That registry lists offenders’ names and addresses online so parents and communities know where they live,” said Schuman, adding that Wyden’s bill “leaves that system fully intact, explicitly permits law enforcement to share information with at-risk individuals, and exempts the press so news outlets can continue reporting freely on offenders.”
“Nothing in the bill would prevent parents from being notified or limit public access to this critical information,” said Schuman.
Cruz also objected to a second piece of legislation that Wyden introduced soon after, S.2851, which would have extended the protections for federal officials and lawmakers to state officials and their staff, as well as survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.
In response, Cruz said that he was “interested in expanding the protection to as wide a universe as is feasible, as is practicable, but that answer is not yet worked out.”
Updated to include additional comment from the American Governance Institute, and corrected an earlier version to address that two Minnesota lawmakers were shot, one of whom died.
