The NSA gets Americans' location data without any sort of warrant by buying it from data brokers.

The NSA kept this secret, and Senator Wyden had to block a nomination to extract the admission that the NSA does this. I presume he knew this for a fact, from secret sources he was allowed to see, but in order to take action to stop the practice he needed something he could lawfully cite.

The NSA currently says it "minimizes" such collection, which means doing no more than it finds "necessary" for whatever goal it is working on. How much is that? We don't know.

We do know there is danger that a year from now the US will have a dictator nominally called "president", a dictator that cooperates with Putin and whose supporters include state officials who seek to repress abortion and women who get abortions. What will the NSA and other government agencies do then, with the location data they can obtain?

Of course, we should do our best to make sure that the wrecker loses to Biden again, and we should prepare to crush the coup that he already encourages his followers to mount.

But this should also remind us that it is unacceptable for the systems we use to keep track of our activities. The most sensitive personal data is about details:

• Where did you go?
• What did you do there?
• Who did you communicate with (and what was said)?

We must put an end to tracking and collection of people's sensitive activity data except based on specific warrants to authorize such collection.