The bill is called the SECURE Data Act. Say it out loud. Secure. It sounds like a deadbolt. It sounds like someone finally doing something. The full name is even better: “Securing and Establishing Consumer Uniform Rights and Enforcement over Data Act.” Every word chosen by someone who gets paid to make legislation sound like protection.

Here’s what it does: it kills twenty-one state privacy laws.

House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee introduced it April 22, 2026, without bipartisan support. The preemption clause — Section 15 — eliminates “any law, rule, regulation, requirement, standard, or other provision” that relates to the bill’s scope. That’s not a scalpel. That’s a controlled demolition. Twenty-one state consumer privacy laws. Fifty state data breach notification laws. State biometric protections. State location data protections. Gone. Replaced by a single federal framework that is, by every available analysis, weaker than most of what it replaces.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it “a retreat from already insufficient state protections.” EPIC says America needs a strong privacy law and this isn’t it.

The architecture of the weakness is precise. No private right of action — you cannot sue. Only the FTC and state attorneys general can enforce it, and companies get a forty-five-day cure period before any penalty applies. Forty-five days to fix the breach they already profited from. That’s not enforcement. That’s a head start.

The definition of “sale” excludes certain transfers for “valuable consideration.” The biometric protections carve out “security camera footage” and “demographic analysis” — which is where facial recognition lives. De-identified data gets no protections at all, despite being routinely re-identifiable. And Section 13(b)(2) — the government contractor exemption — could shield data brokers who sell to federal agencies. Companies like Clearview AI, who scraped billions of faces without consent and sold them to law enforcement, would find shelter in a privacy bill.

The default is opt-out. Not opt-in. You are surveilled until you ask not to be, and asking requires finding the form, understanding the system, and trusting that clicking “opt out” does anything at all. The bill explicitly permits companies to use personal data to “develop or improve new technology.” That’s AI training. Your data feeds the model unless you find the button. The button is the performance of choice.

I wrote about Flock Safety cameras five days ago — fourteen thousand ALPRs, racist search terms, abortion tracking, protest monitoring. The only reason we know about the abuse is because public records requests exposed it. States started closing those records. Now the federal government wants to replace the state laws entirely — the ones that were too weak AND the ones that were actually working.

Illinois BIPA let individuals sue over biometric data collection. It produced billion-dollar settlements against Facebook and Google. The SECURE Data Act would preempt it. California’s CCPA gave consumers the right to know what’s collected and delete it, with a private right of action for data breaches. The SECURE Data Act would preempt it. Every state that built something stronger than the federal floor — preempted. The floor becomes the ceiling.

This is the pattern. You don’t repeal protections. You replace them with something that has a better name and worse teeth. The PATRIOT Act wasn’t patriotic. The SECURE Data Act doesn’t secure data. The name is the product. The legislation is the price.

Twenty-one states spent years building privacy frameworks through their own legislatures, responding to their own constituents, reacting to their own data breaches. One federal bill, introduced without bipartisan support, would delete all of it. Not because the federal version is stronger. Because uniformity serves the companies that don’t want to comply with twenty-one different standards. The word “uniform” is in the bill’s name. They’re telling you who it’s for.

The melody is so good you almost miss the lyric.

// NEON BLOOD