US: The proposed, Geolocational Surveillance and Privacy bill, will prohibit police and the US federal law enforcement from tracking citizens’ location through cellphones, GPS devices and other electronic items without first getting a warrant, according to a draft version of the bill provided by freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s office. Freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. will introduce the bill in coming week.
“Law enforcement, in my mind, has overstepped its bounds and thrown out many of our Fourth Amendment rights,” Chaffetz told at the Personal Democracy Forum conference at New York University in Manhattan.
“They have, right now, the ability to take a GPS device, put it on the bottom of your car and follow you without ever getting a search warrant,” he continued. “I think the American public deserves and expects a degree of personal privacy. We in America don’t work on a presumption of guilt.”
The geolocational bill is expected to be the first of several bills Chaffetz’s discussions with Wyden will yield in the coming months and year, he told the audience. The bill also would impose criminal penalties on individuals who use GPS devices to surreptitiously track a person’s movements.
The bill also would prohibit cellphone companies and other providers of trackable devices from sharing customers’ past or present location information without their clear consent.
The legislation would apply to US citizens’ location information even when they are outside the US and pertain equally to past and present location information, according to the draft bill.
Source:Â Nextgov.com
