Tag: USA Freedom Act

The NSA Stopped Spying on Americans Last Night… Just Kidding

Guest Post by Claire Bernish

 

(ANTIMEDIA) Sunday marked the end of the NSA’s highly contentious bulk data collection program, as widely reported by corporate media outlets. But for all intents and purposes, as the USA Freedom Act kicked off in its place on Sunday, this termination was a purely hollow, symbolic gesture.

As Edward Snowden revealed two years ago, the National Security Agency implemented a program to vacuum up the metadata of essentially all domestic communications in the U.S. by liberally interpreting controversial provisions in the USA Patriot Act — which federal courts have since found unconstitutional. Under the transparent guise of fighting terrorism, the NSA argued in court its justification for casting such a broad net; but after an earlier reversal, District Court Judge Richard Leon ripped into the program in an epicly caustic ruling in favor of civilians.

But if you think for a second the NSA would actually cease such paranoid spying on the U.S. populace, you might not know much about the Freedom Act. Whomever claims responsibility for naming these programs clearly does so with a snide irony only the government could be capable of; whatever the moniker, it’s usually safe to assume the opposite is true — and the Freedom Act is no exception.

Sure, massive amounts of data are no longer being collected — by the NSA. That’s because now, telecommunications corporations have simply taken over where the government left off. To wit, as Bernard E. Harcourt penned yesterday in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

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A Hopeful Edward Snowden Says “The Balance Of Power Is Beginning To Shift”

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/06/2015 10:43 -0400

It has been two years ago since Edward Snowden released to the world a trove of proof that the NSA, the US’ top spy organization, had been focused as much on spying on its own people as on threats from abroad, in the process crushing countless constitutional civil and personal liberties. For his whistleblowing efforts, he was forced into self-appointed exile in Russia to avoid a lengthy prison sentence in the US.

Which is ironic, because on June 2, with the passage of the “Freedom Act” (which actually is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act), the NSA’s recording of US electronic communications officially ended, in effect validating Snowden’s efforts at halting the US conversion into a totalitarian police state.

In reality NSA surveillance did not really end: bulk collection of Americans’ metadata is still allowed by phone companies, which is then accessible by the NSA. According to skeptics this makes intrusion into US private lives even more deliberate as private corporations are not subject to FOIA requests or government intervention: in effect Obama has washed his hands of all supervision over data collection even as the NSA still has full access to everything it could ever ask for (it is unclear why the massive NSA spy facility in Bluffdale, Utah will continue existing if the NSA is no longer allowed to intercept and record data).

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It’s Official: The USA Freedom Act Is Just As Destructive As The USA Patriot Act

Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereign Man blog,

My general rule of thumb when it comes to legislation is that the more high-sounding the name, the more insidious the law.

Exhibit A: the just-passed USA FREEDOM Act.

“Freedom”. It sounds great.

So great, in fact, that they stuck it in the title and built an absurd acronym around it– the real name of the law is “Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015″.

U-S-A-F-R-E-E-D-O-M. Hooray!

And without fail, the media has bought in to the myth, praising the government for heralding in a new era of liberty with headlines like “Congress Reins In NSA’s Spying Powers” and “NSA phone program doomed as Senate passes USA Freedom Act”.

Unfortunately this is simply not the case. And shame on the mainstream media for making such thinly-researched, fallacious assertions.

If anyone had actually taken the time to read the legislation, they’d see that most of the ‘concessions’ made by the government are entirely hollow.

Secret FISA courts still exist. Lone wolf surveillance authority and roving wiretaps still exist. They can still grab oodles of other data like medical and business records.

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Free Speech, Facebook and the NSA: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

“A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy.”—Writers Against Mass Surveillance

THE GOOD NEWS: Americans have a right to freely express themselves on the Internet, including making threatening—even violent—statements on Facebook, provided that they don’t intend to actually inflict harm.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Elonis v. United States threw out the conviction of a Pennsylvania man who was charged with making unlawful threats (it was never proven that he intended to threaten anyone) and sentenced to 44 months in jail after he posted allusions to popular rap lyrics and comedy routines on his Facebook page. It’s a ruling that has First Amendment implications for where the government can draw the line when it comes to provocative and controversial speech that is protected and permissible versus speech that could be interpreted as connoting a criminal intent.

That same day, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, the legal justification allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to carry out warrantless surveillance on Americans, officially expired. Over the course of nearly a decade, if not more, the NSA had covertly spied on millions of Americans, many of whom were guilty of nothing more than using a telephone, and stored their records in government databases. For those who have been fighting the uphill battle against the NSA’s domestic spying program, it was a small but symbolic victory.

THE BAD NEWS: Congress’ legislative “fix,” intended to mollify critics of the NSA, will ensure that the agency is not in any way hindered in its ability to keep spying on Americans’ communications.

The USA FREEDOM Act could do more damage than good by creating a false impression that Congress has taken steps to prevent the government from spying on the telephone calls of citizens, while in fact ensuring the NSA’s ability to continue invading the privacy and security of Americans.

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