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Government Privacy United States Politics Technology

Trump Administration Asks Congress To Reauthorize NSA's Deactivated Call Records Program (nytimes.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Breaking a long silence about a high-profile National Security Agency program that sifts records of Americans' telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists, the Trump administration on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down -- but asked Congress to extend its legal basis anyway. From a report: In a letter to Congress delivered on Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans' domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act. The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but the Trump administration wants it made permanent. The unclassified letter, signed on Wednesday by Dan Coats in one of his last acts as the director of National Intelligence, also conceded that the N.S.A. has indefinitely shut down that program after recurring technical difficulties repeatedly caused it to collect more records than it had legal authority to gather. That fact has previously been reported, but the administration had refused to officially confirm its status.
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Trump Administration Asks Congress To Reauthorize NSA's Deactivated Call Records Program More

Trump Administration Asks Congress To Reauthorize NSA's Deactivated Call Records Program

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  • One common purpose (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lgw ( 121541 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @01:15PM (#59090668) Journal

    There's one thing every DC politician can agree on: government should have more power over its citizens. Oh, they may argue over priorities, which aspect of your life they want control over next, but they all agree that power is good.

    • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by PopeRatzo ( 965947 )

      There's one thing every DC politician can agree on: government should have more power over its citizens.

      It shows growth that you're willing to admit Donald Trump is just another DC politician.

      • Yes, he should be voted out with the rest of them.

      • Re:One common purpose (Score:5, Interesting)

        by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @01:56PM (#59090858)

        lol, trump is converting a swamp (useful) into a cesspool, expect him to use this re-authorized data mining for self-centered purposes

        • Trump is converting nothing. The swamp has been a cesspool for a long time and he is just another decoration. Trump is a symptom of the problem, until we start working with that logic we are not going to be making any changes.

          Trump knows how to troll and game the system. The Republicans are getting played just as bad as the Democrats. Many republicans don't want to admit it because he is their guy, many Democrats don't want to admit it because Trump is using their playbook to do it!

          You want Trump out of

        • >"is converting a swamp (useful) "

          The government "swamp" is not useful.

        • Well of course he needs to spy on everyone. How do you expect him to catch the Clintons plotting against him if he can't listen to their phone calls?
      • You know of another DC politician who wields his sociopathic tendencies as weapons rather than try to hide them?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        "Just" another overstates the claim, but he certainly has some properties in common with the set. I expect it will gradually worsen over the decades he's president.

  • Unlikely to have Democratic support. (Score:3)

    by lionchild ( 581331 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @01:25PM (#59090712) Journal

    This isn't likely to have Democratic support, especially on the heels of having the US Envoy in Israel support the barring of Democratic Congresswomen entering Israel.

    • oh... it has democratic support... just not when Trump makes the request.

      Didn't hear much of peep from Democrats as Obama kept and continued Bush's spying policies.

      Much like many republicans that are going to stick by Trump even though he is showing no spine against Hong Kong and North Korea right now, despite the fact that many republicans have treated China as a threat since the Clintoons were in bed with them.

      The only thing you can always guarantee about "democracy" minded people. They like to commit s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Jesus, get your mind out of the gutter, the GP was simply remarking the Democrats are unlikely to give the Trump Administration more power to fuck things up. There was no support for Democrats in that statement.

    • >"This isn't likely to have Democratic support,"

      Nonsense. Spying on Americans has had largely bipartisan support for as long as I can remember.

    • You are suggesting there are 2 major political parties in Washington. There are not. Nancy Pelosi and her Right Wing (Democrat?) friends work for the corporations just like little Donny Trump does. If they want this to pass it will.

  • I'd forgotten about that act... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @01:25PM (#59090716) Homepage Journal

    I'd assumed that the NSA had just ignored...

    The USA FREEDOM act. Has there ever been a more deliberately MIS-named bill?

    • the government needs to spy on you and control your communication, so you can have FREEDOM and be SAFE.

    • >"The USA FREEDOM act. Has there ever been a more deliberately MIS-named bill?"

      How about the "Patriot Act"? As if it is somehow patriotic to suspend rights and authorize spying on American citizens. That is where this all started. But yes, both names are offensive.

    • They're always misnamed like that to push members of Congress to support it. If you were a member of Congress and opposed your bill, your opponents would start running ads asking why you opposed USA Freedom. Why do you hate freedom so much?!!! Vote for Candidate X who loves freedom and who will pass dozens of new bills named after other good things like puppies and babies (even if the bill has nothing to do with them)!

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @01:32PM (#59090748)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Trust Us. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @01:34PM (#59090754)
    Remember when we said we wouldn't spy on you because that would be against the law, but then we got caught spying on you, so we made it legal (retroactively) to spy on you for a limited time, and then we said we were shutting down the spying program? Well, we need to extend that indefinitely; but don't worry, we're not spying on you now (even though we did in the past), and we're definitely not lying about not spying on you (even though we did in the past), and we will only spy on you in the future if we have a really super good reason and will definitely tell you if we start spying on you again. Trust us.

    Also, that guy who revealed that we were spying on you is a bad man and should go to jail. But the people who spied on you are patriots and will never go to jail, ever.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RAHH ( 5900166 )
      there is no mass protests anymore in America that would spur change so the Govt. will continue to rape its citizens because why not? No repercussions from the people that continue to allow them in office.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The sad thing is that pretty much exactly this is going on in plain sight and most people are still too stupid and blind to see it.

    • best take

  • This has never worked before (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Micah NC ( 5616634 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @02:07PM (#59090908)
    They have never caught anyone using this technology.

    It is rife for stifling political decent.

    • Re:This has never worked before (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @02:18PM (#59090948)

      I'm pretty sure they use it all the time to catch drug trafficking. How many times do you hear about a large shipment getting pulled over because the driver ran a red light or was speeding? I think the feds listen in and then tip off the local cops who then make a fake traffic stop. See parallel reconstruction and the Snowden leaks.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        And that would be criminal and for good reasons. Are you saying the feds are using criminal means and thereby are criminals?

        Would personally not surprise me, one of the characteristics of a police state is that the police can ignore the law without consequences.

      • I have literally never heard of a large shipment getting pulled over because the driver ran a red light or was speeding, and neither have you. This is because people driving large shipments tend to like to live to get paid and spend the money, which isn't about to happen if they speed or run red lights. They don't get high while working, which is what they are doing, and threat of death tends to keep ones eyes on the speedometer and traffic lights and signs.

        • You're so full of shit your eyes are brown.

          https://www.kansas.com/news/lo... [kansas.com]
          https://www.timesunion.com/new... [timesunion.com]
          https://www.cbs58.com/news/spe... [cbs58.com]
          https://www.charlotteobserver.... [charlotteobserver.com]
          https://www.twincities.com/201... [twincities.com]
          https://www.twincities.com/201... [twincities.com]
          https://www.ksn.com/news/crime... [ksn.com]

          Yeah like I said, speeding, not wearing a seat belt, not signaling. That was two minutes of googling.

          • Literally none of those stories are about large shipments. 100 lbs. of drugs is a very small shipment. In at least one case they found no drugs during the vehicle search. I get that you live in Mayberry and have never seen a single movie or watched a single documentary where large drug shipments are made, but that doesn't make your assertion any less stupid. These were all amateurs, clearly high AF in their booking photos, not people entrusted with large drug shipments.

            • Admit you're wrong dipshit. You claimed it never happens. When was the last time you saw anyone get pulled over for the sole reason of not wearing a seat belt?

              • I have seen people get pulled over for seat belt violations many times. It usually happens to people they suspect of other crimes, like with people who look like drugged out fiends as these people do, with zero need for any parallel construction. Simple profiling is all. You listed 8 times a traffic stop resulted in finding drugs in a country of how many million people? Do you have any idea how many tons of drugs get transported in the country every single day? To suggest that this wouldn't be statistically
  • In the eyes of the NSA, that's a feature, not a bug!

  • And so the next fascist catastrophe is prepared (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @02:43PM (#59091054)

    Because mass-surveillance, police that can ignore the law, aggressive designation of some groups of people as "the ones responsible" for everything that goes wrong (and the ones that will later go to the death-camps) are all warning signs and these are not early warning signs anymore. The process is well underway.

  • Election (Score:3)

    by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Thursday August 15, 2019 @03:21PM (#59091280)
    There is an election coming up. Trump REALLY needs to know what the opposition are doing. He probably feels he has enough temporary people in th important jobs that are loyal to him and he can get away with it.
  • NSA: Dear Mr. Trump, no need to ask congress to re-authorize program. We never really stopped it. Did you think we would give that up just because the authorization ran out?
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  • This request to make permanent the badlaw authorizing unamerican mass surveillance was the last act of DNI Dan Coats, an official that President Trump just forced out of office. So I'm not sure it's fair to describe this villainous request as the work of the Trump team.

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