Is the govt. allowed to spy on us?

Governments can collect information for the purpose of investigating and prosecuting serious crimes, and sometimes for preventing them. So sometimes police and security services can listen to phone conversations or see someone’s internet history

However, with the spread of the internet and the increase in threats from international terrorism, governments have become more able and willing to ‘spy’ on people. The existence of extensive surveillance activities came to light in 2013 when Edward Snowden leaked very large amounts of information about the NSA and its secret and unprecedented collection of ‘metadata’ (essentially data about data) on huge numbers of people who are suspected of no crime.

The US govt wants to pass new spying laws behind your back:

The Senate might try to sneak through a “cybersecurity” bill that would, as the ACLU puts it, “create a massive loophole in our existing privacy laws”. The vague and ambiguous law would essentially allow companies like Google and Facebook to hand over even more of your personal information to the US government, all of which could ultimately end up in the hands of the NSA and the FBI.

Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein says she’s willing to make privacy compromises to get the bill to the floor, but did not elaborate – at all – on what those were. And given the sleazy tactics of House permanent select intelligence committee member Mike Rogers in pretending he had the support of privacy groups when the House passed its version of the bill, it’s hard to take anything the intelligence committees say in the area of privacy on good faith.

The FBI’s dangerous new proposal that would force tech companies like Google and Facebook to insert backdoors into all their internet email and chat programs would categorically make cybersecurity worse. Security experts almost universally agree: creating a vulnerability that law enforcement agencies can exploit will be found by foreign governments and criminals, making it that much easier for, say, China to break into our communications as well. It’s happened before, and will happen again.

Some politicians and intel hawks are pushing for even more radical powers to sneak by while you’re not watching.The Washington Post reported about how some former government officials want to give private companies “hacking-back” powers – that is, they should be able to hack into the systems of anyone they think is hacking them. This insane idea is so reckless that even its biggest supporters admitted to the Post that it would likely ensnare innocent people, but that hasn’t stopped them from continually pushing the idea in cybersecurity circles.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/12/new-spying-laws-cybersecurity-nsa-fbi