The latest issue of the New Yorker magazine contains an article
State of Deception about NSA surveillance that echos several posts on this blog:
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The NSA: The only part of government that actually listens
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ACLU v. Clapper director of NSA
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Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor
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Spying Without Borders to become the Law
While searching for the answers author of the article discussed the NSA surveillance issue with many people including US Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, who is a member of the Senate Intelligence committee and "is now working on a bill that would ban the mass collection of phone records and reform the court that oversees the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance."
Wyden, who said that he has had “several spirited discussions” with Obama, is not optimistic. “It really seems like General Clapper, the intelligence leadership, and the lawyers drive this in terms of how decisions get made at the White House,” he told me. It is evident from the Snowden leaks that Obama inherited a regime of dragnet surveillance that often operated outside the law and raised serious constitutional questions. Instead of shutting down or scaling back the programs, Obama has worked to bring them into narrow compliance with rules—set forth by a court that operates in secret—that often contradict the views on surveillance that he strongly expressed when he was a senator and a Presidential candidate.
Publication in the New Yorker magazine coincided with today's article in the Guardian
Twitter, Facebook and more demand sweeping changes to US surveillance laws
What is interesting that the companies that themselves collect a lot of consumers' information and sometimes were even penalized by the courts for violating privacy of unsuspecting consumers. As New Yorker article pointed out
In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information. Feinstein maintains that data collection is not surveillance. But it is no longer clear if there is a distinction.
Now the largest Internet companies "got upset" by NSA using them and their data and under pressure from their users demand the Government to change NSA practices.
The world's leading technology companies have united to demand sweeping changes to US surveillance laws, urging an international ban on bulk collection of data to help preserve the public's “trust in the internet”.
In their most concerted response yet to disclosures by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter and AOL have published an open letter to Barack Obama and Congress on Monday, throwing their weight behind radical reforms already proposed by Washington politicians.
The New Yorker article reminded us once again that this is by far not the first time NSA's program violated the laws
In the nineteen-seventies, a Senate committee chaired by Frank Church revealed widespread abuses at the N.S.A., the C.I.A., and other agencies, including active programs to spy on Americans. An N.S.A. program called Project SHAMROCK, which started shortly after the Second World War, had persuaded three major American telegraph companies to hand over most of their traffic. By the time the program was shut down, in 1975, the N.S.A. had collected information on some seventy-five thousand citizens. For many years, the information was shared with the C.I.A., which was running its own illegal domestic-intelligence program, Operation CHAOS.
We need to keep the pressure or to say goodbye to our civil liberties. Please, help us by signing
petition to the Congress and send a message to your friends urging them to sign the petition as well before it is too late. After our rights and liberties gone, it will be more difficult, if not impossible, to get them back.