After passing through the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, the
so-called “FISA Improvements Act” is poised to actually do the complete
opposite of what its title implies. Instead of being an improvement to
the bill that allows the NSA
to spy on American citizens, the bill advocates the very unacceptable
practices that threaten the privacy rights of American. Even worse, it
weakens one of the few effective and powerful checks to the abuse of such programs, diminishing the accountability of government to their people.
Sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the bill aims to
effectively legitimize the controversial data-collection programs used
by the NSA. Seen as
completely unconstitutional by many, those data-collection programs
collect records of online data — both domestic and foreign. Feinstein
herself claims the complete opposite, saying that the bill would
prohibit mass data collection, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation
says otherwise, stating the bill is “designed to bolster some of the
worst NSA surveillance programs and grant new authority to the NSA to engage in surveillance.”
Indeed, after reading a little of the bill myself, it became clear
that while the bill doesn’t allow the content of communications may not
be collected (which was supposedly the case before), it still allows the
NSA to continue collecting the related metadata, which was the very reason why the programs were controversial in the first place.
Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment