According to Vox
During the coronavirus pandemic, many of us have vastly increased the time we spend online and moved many of the activities from outside of our homes to the confines of the internet. In the middle of this — and with this shift in mind — the Senate voted on Wednesday not to protect Americans’ internet browsing and search history data from secret and warrantless surveillance by law enforcement. The measure needed 60 votes to pass. It got 59.
The outcome is especially frustrating since four senators didn’t vote on the amendment at all, and at least one would have voted yes. Lamar Alexander couldn’t vote because he’s quarantined. Two others — Ben Sasse and Bernie Sanders — didn’t respond to request for comment on where they were during the vote. An aide told Politico that Patty Murray would have voted yes had she been there, but the senator was not in Washington, DC, when the vote occurred. In the end, the result didn’t come down to party — there were plenty of Republican and Democratic votes on both sides — but attendance.
The vote was for an amendment to the controversial Patriot Act, which would have expressly forbidden internet browsing and history from what the government is allowed to collect through the approval of a secret court. Currently, there is no such provision, which means there’s nothing stopping the government from doing so. The government has an established history of using this method to collect certain types of data about millions of Americans without their knowledge.
“There is little information that is more personal than your web browsing history,” Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat who sponsored the amendment, told Recode. “If you know that a person is visiting the website of a mental health professional, or a substance abuse support group, or a particular political organization, or a particular dating site, you know a tremendous amount of private and personal information about that individual.”