House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk surveillance
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
Here's a helpful webpage that'll give you your congressman's phone number from your zip code as well as a script to read: http://defundthensa.com/
"Alexander's meeting was listed as 'top-secret' and divided into two two-hour sessions, the first for Republicans and the second for Democrats."
"... We look forward to continuing to discuss these critical issues with the American people and the Congress.
However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. ..."
Not the product of an informed process - and whose fault is that?
More... http://pastebin.com/RF5U59N0
When you have your own private supreme court(FISA Courts) to rubber stump rules for you, it's pretty easy to find and/or create loop holes.
On the plus side, if it gets stopped at least we will know who to throw out of office.
I continue bringing this up whenever a submission like this appears, because I am very much afraid that the technical community will accept a congressional victory as "okay, let's continue business as usual", when we need to be reinventing everything that has made mass-wiretapping possible in the first place.
Are you suggesting we somehow roll back the last sixty-odd years of telecommunications and information technology? What do you suggest we replace it with?
But we can take another approach.
If this REALLY matters, we should be directing our attention not to some nebulous and almost certainly unenforceable government action, but rather to the eye of the storm: the very things we are building.
This is good mind-fodder if you have a moment to spare: http://zeroknowledgeprivacy.org/
Let's put some momentum on this thing!
And in case you needed reason not to write, call, or email your representative: You will almost never be able to get her on the line. An office staffer will answer the phone (or sometimes just a voicemail box), sort the letters, and go through emails, responding with a form reply, if anything.
What those staffers will hand your legislator, likely, is a tally of how many notes and calls they received from X number of constituents on Y different issues. That summation, however, is what's powerful. In a legislator's very busy day, these briefs are easy to digest and send the most black-and-white picture of what his voters believe.
So yes, your letters and phone calls matter. In aggregate. JUST LIKE VOTES!"
"... the NSA itself has indicated its willingness to consider abandoning the phone-records collection provided the telecommunications companies it partners with retains the data."
The FCC is unable to actually regulate in some areas (ADSL for example)as states rights trump its ability to be an effective regulator.
It's not about whom you trust more. It's about the power of the phone company to string together your phone calls, your cell phone calls, your Internet access, your library books, and your license plate camera sightings. That power is nil with the phone company since they don't have all that other data and they don't have any kind of reason or mandate to make those kinds of connections. The NSA, on the other hand...
If the NSA has to ask, via court order, for each set of records it wants, I'm a lot less worried about somebody in government using the data for personal entertainment, financial gain, or political advantage.
This is an assumption (and a dangerous one, imho). From what I've read they've already optimised the hell out of getting 'court-orders' so I don't see it as a stretch to imagine that they would do the same with data stored at remote locations.
There have been stories that said companies would help with NSA access since the alternative was to have NSA machines on site. Pushing data back to the companies doesn't mean NSA would walk in and demand to install some of their own hardware.
We literally have no idea what is done with the bulk-collected data at the NSA. As Snowden and Manning show, internal controls on supposedly sensitive data are weak. But we do know that they can't look through the data they haven't collected.
The court order, even if it's easy to get, leaves a paper trail thrice over. One with the executive branch, one with the courts, and one with whatever company has to cough up data. That won't prevent somebody sufficiently powerful and confident from getting data. But it will act as a significant deterrent to casual snooping by insiders, and also to political misuse of the system.
And I suggest you Google Ernestine the operator
"You're dealing with the phone company, Mr. Veedle. We are not bound by city, state, or federal regulations. We are omnipotent."
You can't be serious. NSA simply won't lose.