Friday, December 20

Tag: FISA

GOP Group Blocks Surveillance Law Update In House
11Apr By adminNo Comments
Politics

GOP Group Blocks Surveillance Law Update In House

Rebellious House Republicans on Wednesday turned back an effort to renew an anti-terror surveillance law that’s been used in the past to spy on Americans, leaving its fate up in the air less than 10 days before it’s set to expire.The fight over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — and particularly the post-9/11-era spying provision Section 702 — has pitted both Republicans and Democrats worried about civil liberties against a similarly bipartisan group that sees the law as a crucial tool in the country’s national security toolbox.Nineteen Republicans bucked party leaders and voted against allowing the renewal bill and amendments to be debated on the House floor, stalling its progress with a 193-228 vote.“The constitutional liberties of Americans have to come first. We don’t bend th...
Read More
How to Fix Section 702 Surveillance
12Dec By adminNo Comments
Business

How to Fix Section 702 Surveillance

Congress is still debating how to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and doing it right has never been more important. The risk of terrorism has gone up since Hamas’s massacre in Israel, and the U.S. needs all the intel it can get to detect and prevent future attacks on the American homeland.Section 702 lets the government monitor non-U.S. citizens outside the U.S. to protect national security. The information collected goes into a database that can later be searched by law enforcement. But the authority has come under scrutiny after abuses by some Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who ran searches related to Black Lives Matter protesters and even Members of Congress. Lawmakers want to reauthorize the program while protecting civil libertie...
Read More
A Powerful Tool US Spies Misused to Stalk Women Faces Its Potential Demise
24Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

A Powerful Tool US Spies Misused to Stalk Women Faces Its Potential Demise

A federal law authorizing a vast amount of the United States military’s foreign intelligence collection is set to expire in two months, pulling the plug on history’s most prolific eavesdropping operation and the primary means by which US spies intercept the private communications of people deemed threatening, or simply interesting, by the US government—the world’s foremost surveillant.The US National Security Agency (NSA) relies heavily on the statute, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, when compelling the cooperation of communications giants that oversee huge swaths of the world’s internet traffic, intercepting hundreds of millions of phone calls and email messages each year, and eavesdropping on the personal conversations of targeted foreign individuals and anyone...
Read More
Top US Spies Meet With Privacy Experts Over Surveillance ‘Crown Jewel’
9Sep By adminNo Comments
Technology

Top US Spies Meet With Privacy Experts Over Surveillance ‘Crown Jewel’

Senior United States intelligence officials met privately in Virginia yesterday with over a dozen civil liberties groups to field concerns about domestic surveillance operations that have drawn intense scrutiny this summer among an unlikely coalition of Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the US Congress.The closed-door session, convened at the Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus—a sprawling complex housing the bulk of the nation’s counterterrorism infrastructure—comes amid a backdrop of political furor over past misuses of a powerful surveillance tool by, principally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Republican lawmakers, who remain aggrieved over the FBI’s botched operation to surveil a former Trump campaign aide amid its 2016 Russia investigation, have formed an extraordi...
Read More