The US Used the Patriot Act to Justify Logging Website Visitors

The US government has been using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify allowing law enforcement to log who visits certain popular web pages, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. The government has not gone so far as to collect users’ keyword searches in search engines, but it has felt emboldened to monitor website visitors without a warrant. Section 215 and a couple of other surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act expired in March as the US descended into pandemic social distancing and lockdown measures, and Congress has still not made headway on how to reinstate or revise it. The law allows the FBI to seek clandestine court orders to collect any data from a business that connects to national-security-related investigations.

Lily Hay Newman