Senate Bill Would Ban Most Bulk Surveillance 176
An anonymous reader writes: Today Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced a bill that would ban bulk collection of telephone records and internet data for U.S. citizens. This is a stronger version of the legislation that passed the U.S. House in May, and it has support from the executive branch as well. "The bill, called the USA Freedom Act, would prohibit the government from collecting all information from a particular service provider or a broad geographic area, such as a city or area code, according to a release from Leahy's office. It would expand government and company reporting to the public and reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews NSA intelligence activities. Both House and Senate measures would keep information out of NSA computers, but the Senate bill would impose stricter limits on how much data the spy agency could seek."
Good progress, still needs more work (Score:5, Interesting)
Allowing full monitoring from someone two hops away from a suspect still can involve a lot of people. What if a suspect were to call Time Warner, then I was to call the same number later that day? It could potentially be a very large number. Also what qualifies as being a suspect? It may be that there are a half million suspects, and a majority of the earth's population is two hops away.
It also doesn't remove the First Amendment violations on the National Security Letters.
doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
1. The President doesn't support this. He's the executive and is over the NSA. If he really wanted to stop bulk data collection he would simply call the NSA and say "hey, quit doing bulk collection". The law is needed specifically because he doesn't support it.
2. Unless the law will include criminal penalties it's of no value. A cursory glance shows that it simply says "hey, don't do that" instead of "hey, don't do that, and if you do it'll be a class _ felony with a minimum penalty of ___". It's interesting how laws made to limit non-government workers *always* have the criminal penalties, and laws that are made to limit government workers always conveniently forget that part. When we start jailing people who break laws like this we'll start making headway.
Re:A sad perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
It turns out that spying on Europe is perfectly legal in the US after this law passes, and that spying on the US is perfectly legal in Europe. . . .
Lucky for everyone's citizens, no European country and the US are incredibly close allies.
Re:For domestic use only (Score:5, Interesting)
1. make them stop spying on US citizens
2. make them stop spying on everyone else
2 will never happen from within the U.S. Our own governments are the ones who have to protect our communications and, as I said, they have not expressed any willingness to do anything in that direction, which is sad.
Re:Alright! Go Senate bill (Score:5, Interesting)
TFS notes that Obama is behind this bill.
I find this interesting, since as head of the Executive Branch, he can order the NSA to do what this bill requires without bothering with a law, since no law exists requiring the NSA to collect telephone records on everyone.
And if such a law existed, it would be pretty clearly unconstitutional, and thus null and void....