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House Votes To End Spy Agencies' Bulk Collection of Phone Data
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a story at Reuters that gives a rare bit of good news for the Fourth Amendment: The U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill on Wednesday that would end spy agencies' bulk collection of Americans' telephone data, setting up a potential showdown with the U.S. Senate over the program, which expires on June 1. The House voted 338-88 for the USA Freedom Act, which would end the bulk collection and instead give intelligence agencies access to telephone data and other records only when a court finds there is reasonable suspicion about a link to international terrorism.
For every program we discover there's probably 3 or 4 that we haven't yet.
For every agency we know about, there's probably at least 1 or 2 more.
NSA gets all the news. When's the last time anyone mentioned the NRO?
Does this include DOD, DOJ, all branches of the military, private contractors used to skirt the laws, etc...?
"The revised bill that makes its way to the House floor this morning doesn't look much like the Freedom Act.
This morning's bill maintains and codifies a large-scale, unconstitutional domestic spying program. It claims to end "bulk collection" of Americans' data only in a very technical sense: The bill prohibits the government from, for example, ordering a telephone company to turn over all its call records every day.
But the bill was so weakened in behind-the-scenes negotiations over the last week that the government still can order—without probable cause—a telephone company to turn over all call records for "area code 616" or for "phone calls made east of the Mississippi." The bill green-lights the government's massive data collection activities that sweep up Americans' records in violation of the Fourth Amendment."
--- Justin Amash
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
In fact, it may be too much.
The EFF just withdrew support of the Freedom Act after the 2nd Circuit decision that said Section 215 of the Patriot Act doesn't authorize ANY data collection of Americans. The Freedom Act is a step back from current collection efforts, but actually codifies some that could possibly be overturned without it!