Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, acknowledged Thursday that even getting his...
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, acknowledged Thursday that even getting his proposed Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act through the House Judiciary Committee this year is a “longshot.” He told us his office is “working with law enforcement to tighten up some…
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of the definitions” in the bill, including the one for business records. “It’s going to be a long process,” stretching beyond the Congress, getting the measure through Congress, Chaffetz said after speaking at a Silicon Valley event hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee and the High Tech Law Institute of Santa Clara University’s law school. He’s a member of Judiciary’s Internet subcommittee and the chairman of the Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee. The Supreme Court’s Jones ruling against warrantless location tracking “was very pivotal,” Chaffetz told the audience. “I can’t tell you how important that was. Particularly because it was nine to nothing.” He challenged the government theory that warrantless tracking through communications technology should be allowed because agents could follow people in person. “Why don’t we follow everybody?” Chaffetz said. “Then we'd all be more safe.” But he said he doesn’t want to go overboard with restrictions. Tracking should be allowed in order to find people with Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, Chaffetz said. And technology users should be allowed to trade off their locations to providers in exchange for services, he said. But Chaffetz said he gets worried when government authorities and others want access to the information. He said he supported the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act because the information-sharing between government and businesses that it would enable would be voluntary. That made it nothing like the Stop Online Piracy Act that opponents compared the bill to, Chaffetz said. If the National Security Agency “knew there was a cyberattack coming, wouldn’t we want that information given to the McAfees of the world” to prepare a response, Chaffetz asked. Now that the House has passed the bill, “the challenge to the Senate becomes: ‘OK, if you don’t want to do this, what do you want to do?’ And there don’t seem to be many answers.” Nothing is “going to happen this Congress” on broad intellectual-property legislation, he told us. “I'd be shocked it if did.” But the subject will be “revisited” next Congress, partly out of concern about China’s role in infringement, Chaffetz said.