Radio Check: “Can You Hear Us Now”
(Clear as the Liberty Bell)
Balance of Power Today: We the People right
(Yeah sure)
Update here of that which follows with this
headlines and also here (congressional
action background:
“NSA SURVEILLANCE BILL WOULD LEGALIZE LOOPHOLE THAT
LETS FBI SPY ON AMERICANS WITHOUT A WARRANT”
The bill would reauthorize
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which serves as
the basis for some of the NSA’s largest surveillance programs, and keep it on
the books through 2023.
The law was first passed in
2008 after the George W. Bush administration’s secret warrantless wiretapping
was made public, effectively to legalize what the administration was doing. The
law allows the intelligence community to spy on Americans’ transnational
communications without a warrant so long as the “targets” are not Americans.
Note: In 2013, documents leaked by
whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA vacuums up a tremendous
amount of wholly domestic communications through the program as well.
Republicans tried to ram
through a different incarnation of the bill last month, based on a more
draconian version passed by the House Intelligence Committee. During a daylong
push to drum up support, Republicans circulated fliers depicting enlarged
photos of ISIS fighters, trying to give the impression that failing to pass
that bill would be a gift to foreign terrorists. But leadership backed off
after determining they didn’t have enough votes to pass it, according to
multiple congressional sources. Domestic surveillance is the rare issue on
which hard-right Republicans and left-leaning privacy advocates often find
common ground.
The new version of the bill,
posted on the Rules Committee website is designed to get the
buy-in of Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. It includes compromise
language taken from a separate bill passed out of that committee in November,
which included some modest limitations on existing authorities, including the
reform to backdoor searches.
The bill takes aim at one of
the key problems with the original law: that Section 702 doesn’t limit how data
can be used by federal law enforcement. That has given rise to the
backdoor search loophole, in which the NSA shares certain kinds of information
with the FBI, which the FBI then uses to search for Americans’ communications
without a warrant.
Privacy advocates have called
backdoor searches unconstitutional and urged Congress to close the loophole by
requiring the FBI to get a court order to query Americans’ communications. The
current bill takes a crack at doing so, requiring the FBI to get a warrant
before searching the data in relation to an open criminal investigation.
But the bill carves out large
exceptions. The FBI doesn’t have to apply for a warrant when national security
is involved, or when it determines that there is a “threat to life or serious
bodily harm.” And the bill would continue to allow the FBI to sift through the
data even when those searches don’t involve a specific criminal investigation,
which the FBI already does so often that they have compared it to searching Google.
NOTE: The FBI doesn’t
have to apply for a warrant when national security is involved, or when it
determines a “threat to life or serious bodily harm.”
Deep Background: The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy (the so-called “warrantless
wiretapping”) concerns surveillance of persons within the United
States during the collection of allegedly foreign intelligence by NSA
as part of the touted war on terror.
Under this program, referred
to by the Bush administration as the terrorist surveillance program, part
of the broader President's Surveillance Program, the NSA was authorized by
executive order to monitor, without search warrants, the phone calls,
Internet activity (Web, e-mail, etc.), text messaging, and other communication
involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the
other end of the communication lies within the U.S. However, it has been
discovered that all U.S. communications have been digitally cloned by
government agencies, in apparent violation of unreasonable search and seizure.
Critics claim that the
program was an effort to silence critics of the Bush Administration and
its handling of several controversial issues during its tenure. Under public
pressure, the Bush administration allegedly ceased the warrantless wiretapping
program in January 2007 and returned review of surveillance to the FISA court.
Subsequently, in 2008 Congress passed
the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which relaxed some of the original FISA
court requirements. During the Obama Administration, the NSA has allegedly
continued operating under the new FISA guidelines despite campaign promises to
end warrantless wiretapping.
However, in April 2009
officials at the DOJ acknowledged that the NSA had engaged in
"over collection" of domestic communications in excess of the FISA
court's authority, but claimed that the acts were unintentional and had since
been rectified.
(I Note:
With the above Section 702 amendment-extension, etc. apparently it will
be “Back to the Future” right Doc Brown who is testing latest gadget from NSA):
======================================================
RELATED: The Loss of Personal/Private
Freedom
In one of the greatest
attacks on civil liberties in this country’s history, Democratic and Republican
Senators voted yesterday to approve a measure as part of the $662 billion
defense bill that would allow for the military to hold both citizens and
non-citizens indefinitely without trial — even those arrested on U.S. soil.
This analysis is from constitutional
expert JonathanTurley.
Thanks for stopping and watch what you say – Big Bro
is listening.
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