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Senate Bill Rewrite Lets Feds Read Your E-mail Without Warrants
concealment writes "A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law. [Sen. Patrick] Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge."
Since I live in Vermont I figured I'd call his office - and was passed along to the Judiciary Committee - where I got the [what sounded like every other] usual dissembling response. ("The Senator is very concerned about privacy..."). I'm afraid unless EFF and others get involved very publicly this is a fait accompli.
When SOPA was floating around I called and was told by a (what sounded like a 20-something year-old) staffer "You don't know what you're talking about at all" - exact words - so I'm not holding out much hope!
You're gonna have to rewrite your national anthem at this rate
Home of the brave - Nope. You have a whole agency called TSA which I assume stands for The Scared Americans
And what with this lot you can hardly be called the land of the free
They're the Terrorists' Surrogate Army.
Because they won and we're now an occupied country. And we even supplied the occupation troops for them.
You see a direct attack on the Fourth Amendment, and the best you can come up with is, "ha ha, it was your side that did it, not mine." Do you listen to yourself or are everyone's civil rights just another baseball game to you?
Maybe it's because when Bush was president and something like this is proposed, we heard repeatedly how evil Bush was. Now that Obama is president and this is a bill by a Democrat introduced into a Democrat led Senate, all we hear is that both parties are the same.
Maybe everyone should go back and look at the vote they cast a couple of weeks ago and wonder if they made the right decision. What's the old saying about power corrupting?
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