USA Freedom Act designed to curb surveillance abuse by the NSA is secretly gutted
The version that emerged from Rules Committee is substantially different than the version approved by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees two weeks ago.
“The USA Freedom Act had previously passed through two committees before being secretly watered down behind closed doors,” notes Amie Stepanovich, Senior Policy Counsel at Access, a digital rights organization. “The version we fear could now be negotiated in secret and introduced on the House floor may not move us forward on NSA reform.”
Reformers are still reluctant to openly oppose USA Freedom. That's partially because of the specter of the House Intelligence Committee bill, the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act, which would expand surveillance under the mantle of reform. Privacy groups seem whipsawed between the pale appearance of surveillance reform that is USA Freedom and the actual surveillance expansion that is the Intel bill.
Reps. Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, along with the White House, may have played a game of chess here. They presented their bill, which clearly would make things worse by expanding the NSA's powers, and used it as a sort of backstop. If a bad USA Freedom Act fails, they'll try to push their even worse bill through, and much of Congress could just run home to tell angry constituents that they "fixed" the NSA surveillance issue when they really made it worse. They more or less set it up so that people have to accept the lesser of two evils. But neither will do anything to fix the actual problems of the NSA's overly broad surveillance.
“Before this bill becomes law, Congress must make clear – either through amendments to the bill, through statements in the legislative record, or both – that mass collection of innocent people’s records isn’t allowed,” wrote the New America Foundation.
“The Leadership of the House is demonstrating that it wants to end the debate about surveillance, rather than end bulk collection,” said Harley Geiger, Senior Counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “As amended, the bill may not prevent collection of data on a very large scale in a manner that infringes upon the privacy of Americans with no connection to a crime or terrorism. This is quite disappointing given the consensus by the public, Congress, the President, and two independent review groups that ending bulk collection is necessary.”
The gutting of the USA Freedom Act was virtually ignored by the establishment media – and for good reason: the national security state needs all-encompassing surveillance to retain its hold on power.
Edward Snowden reveals the real reason the national security state has built an unprecedented surveillance grid. “It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express ‘radical’ ideas and who have a ‘radicalizing’ influence on others,” writes Glenn Greenwald for The Guardian.
Because the NSA targets “broad categories of people,” it is capable and willing to conduct surveillance on “anyone anywhere, including in the US, whose ideas the government finds threatening,” Greenwald notes.
The whole thing is fairly typical backroom political wheeling and dealing where it's the public that gets screwed. Even the tech industry, who has been fairly quiet on the bills has finally woken up to the fact that this bill does nothing to end bulk surveillance. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Dropbox, Microsoft and AOL all pulled their own support of the bill, but it's not going to matter.
Rep. Justin Amash has noted that he's "troubled" by what's become of the bill -- and that "Americans expect Congress to protect their basic rights." Unfortunately, at this point, he may be overestimating what Americans have come to expect of Congress. We may want them to protect our basic rights, but we've increasingly learned not to expect it. In fact, we're increasingly being taught to expect the exact opposite.
http://www.infowars.com/no-end-in-sight-for-surveillance-police-state/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140521/15251227314/how-congress-white-house-screwed-you-over-secret-with-usa-freedom-act-that-was-supposed-to-increase-transparency.shtml
Google wants to spy on you while you're driving and in your home:
According to a December letter sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which became public on Tuesday, Google hopes to put ads “on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.” How would this work? Imagine that it’s a cold winter day. The snow starts floating down, a wind kicks up and you go to your thermostat to kick up the heat. In Google’s world, that action could be met with an advertisement on your thermostat for a new wool sweater. Google said in its S.E.C. filing that this plan to advertise in places beyond the desktop and cellphones came about partly because the company expects people to be using several different kinds of Google services and products in the near future. If that is the case, which it probably is, the company said its advertising would be able to follow customers between those experiences. Google hopes to offer advertisers a new feature called “Enhanced Campaigns,” which are advertisements that can be aimed at people across several kinds of devices or experiences, including cellphones, cars or thermostats. “Enhanced Campaigns allows our advertisers to write one ad campaign, which we serve dynamically to the right user at the right time on whatever device makes the most sense,” Google wrote in the filing. “Because users will increasingly view ads and make purchase decisions on and across multiple devices, our view of revenue is similarly device-agnostic.” Enhanced Campaign is a euphemism for enhanced spying, if corporations can profit by spying on us our Constitution be damned!http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/google-plans-to-deliver-ads-through-your-thermostat-and-car/?_php=true&_type=blogs&partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0
Spying on Americans is only getting worse:
We will soon have to live in a world with no such thing as privacy and no such thing as secrecy, says Richard Aldrich, speaking at PINC 15 in Amsterdam. "We will be living in a transparent society, it will be a bit like living in a nudist colony."
"These organizations are becoming cleverer and cleverer. Cleverer than the CIA; cleverer than the KGB." By studying everything he has bought over the last five years, a company could predict with about 90 percent accuracy how Aldrich will vote in the upcoming European elections -- something he claims he doesn't even know himself. He claims he has about 11 percent of his supposedly secret vote left. Citizens too though are increasingly becoming intelligence gatherers. By studying the reaction of the blogosphere to the Boston Marathon bombings -- which led to a mob forming outside the house of someone wrongly identified as the bomber from crowdsourced photos posted on Reddit-- we can understand how dangerous this can be. "Espionage is even scarier when it's controlled by you guys," Aldrich tells the audience.
Much of this is driven by technology & profits, as technology becomes increasingly pervasive and profits skyrocket, our govt. will increasingly sacrifice our privacy and the level of control we have over our data.
Senator Diane Feinstein caught lying again, claims metadata isn't spying:
"It’s not a surveillance program, it’s a data-collection program,” she said while appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
According to supporters of the NSA, metadata is just a bunch of anonymous numbers harvested in hopes of discovering needles. To those actually paying attention, metadata is a very efficient way to collect very personal information about someone. Just because it looks like data doesn't mean it's not surveillance. Let's not forget that metadata provides enough information to justify extrajudicial killings.
It's still surveillance. It just bears no resemblance to what spying used to mean. What the NSA has done is turn "surveillance" into something abstract, but equally invasive. It has eliminated the targeted nature of its classic definition and replaced it with servers full of data, all of it theoretically linked to another abstraction: "terrorism."
Click here to read more.
Here are two more examples of America's insane spying war:
DHS's massive new spying headquarters has cost taxpayer's over $4.5 billion and may never be completed!
The budget has ballooned to $4.5 billion, with completion pushed back to 2026. Even now, as Obama administration officials make the best of their limited funding, they have started design work for a second building that congressional aides and others familiar with the project say may never open.
Click here & here to read more.
Big brother may be watching and listening more closely than ever — as the NYPD wants to use drones & Shot-Spotter technology to spy on conversations in the streets.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union said:
“Drones can be useful in law enforcement but they should not become a vehicle for widespread, secret surveillance of the private space of innocent New Yorkers.”
Click here to read more.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-05/20/espionage-after-the-loss-of-secrets
Stop unregulated license plate tracking (spying) in Massachusetts:
Massachusetts state senators will begin debate on budget amendments. Senator Creem filed Budget Amendment #630 to stop the unregulated, warrantless tracking of our every motoring movement. It's imperative that you call your state senator right away to urge them to support this critical amendment.
License plate reader technology should never be used to track innocent motorists. Keeping unlimited information about the movements of people accused of no crime goes too far. Like the NSA, local police are casting a wide dragnet. But we can stop it.
Amendment #630 would allow police to use this technology for legitimate law enforcement purposes, but set appropriate limits: only keep the data for 90 days, and require a warrant to access it. While 90 days is far from an ideal retention limit, it's a compromise that's immeasurably better than the current state of affairs.
There is currently no Massachusetts law regulating the retention of this sensitive data, private companies and governments can hoard it for eternity, accumulating extremely dangerous troves of information about our location histories.
The warrant protection in Amendment #630 will go a long way to ensure that once collected, government agents aren't simply fishing around for interesting information about their political enemies, ex-girlfriends, or bothersome neighbors.
Here's how to take action:
1. Find your state senator.
2. Pick up the phone and call right away!
When you reach someone in your senator's office, tell them Massachusetts needs to join New Hampshire, Maine, and other states around the nation that have regulated license plate readers. Tell them to vote in support of Amendment #630!
License plate reader technology takes photographs of your license plate―moving or parked, day or night―and records your car's precise location at precise times. AA meeting? Abortion clinic? Domestic violence shelter? Gay bar? Late night rendezvous? Plate readers track your location history at not just one of these types of places, but potentially all of them, painting an intimate and detailed picture of your private life.
http://privacysos.org/node/1410
EFF nominates the Justice Dept's national security division for Golden Padlock award for egregious secrecy:
The Golden Padlock award recognizes “the most secretive publicly-funded agency or person in the United States,” and the U.S. Border Patrol last year took home the inaugural honor for stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests related to agent-involved shootings along the border. While we’ve had our own FOIA battles with Customs & Border Protection in the past, it’s nothing compared to what we’ve encountered trying to shine light on how the NSA conducts mass surveillance.
This year, we formally and publicly nominate the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, or DOJ NSD, for the Golden Padlock.
For years, EFF has been trying to obtain opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, that contain secret interpretations of the Constitution and federal surveillance laws. The government then relies on those secret interpretations to justify the NSA’s surveillance programs. We requested these opinions from DOJ NSD, which represents the government before the FISA court. After the government refused to produce the opinions, we sued—twice.
In each case, DOJ NSD claimed that none of the FISA court’s opinions—not a page, not a portion of a page, not a sentence, not a word—could be released without damaging national security. In some cases, DOJ NSD even refused to tell us how many pages the opinions contained.
There are numerous examples we can point to, but one is just so spectacularly egregious that it, alone, is worthy of special recognition. In one lawsuit, a DOJ NSD official swore that everything in the opinion was classified as “TOP SECRET” and disclosure of any part of the opinion would threaten “grave harm” to national security. Now that the FISA court’s opinion has been declassified, we now know that the super-sensitive information the DOJ was so aggressively defending included… the text of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
Other information the DOJ NSD contended was classified as TOP SECRET included sentences concerning illegal government action, like these:
“The Court is exceptionally concerned about what appears to be a flagrant violation of its order in this matter.”
“The Court must have every confidence that the government is doing its utmost to ensure that those responsible for implementation fully comply with the Court’s orders. The Court no longer has such confidence.”
“The Court now understands, however, that the NSA has acquired, is acquiring, and . . . will continue to acquire, tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications.”
No exemption to FOIA justified the withholding of this information at any time. Release of these sentences would not have revealed any sensitive intelligence information: it only would have informed the public that the government’s surveillance programs were in dire need of reform.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/eff-nominates-justice-departments-national-security-division-golden-padlock-award