The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law. Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act.
It’s no secret that we wanted more. In the wake of the damning evidence of surveillance abuses disclosed by Edward Snowden, Congress had an opportunity to champion comprehensive surveillance reform and undertake a thorough investigation, like it did with the Church Committee. Congress could have tried to completely end mass surveillance and taken numerous other steps to rein in the NSA and FBI. This bill was the result of compromise and strong leadership by Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee and Reps. Robert Goodlatte, Jim Sensenbrenner, and John Conyers. It’s not the bill EFF would have written, and in light of the Second Circuit's thoughtful opinion, we withdrew our support from the bill in an effort to spur Congress to strengthen some of its privacy protections and out of concern about language added to the bill at the behest of the intelligence community.
Even so, we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could never happen—a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by Congress. And we’re hoping that this could be a turning point in the fight to rein in the NSA.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
2More
3More
The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries | Claire Provost and Matt... - 1 views
2More
Pirate Bay: What Raid? Police Never Got Our Servers - TorrentFreak - 1 views
2More
As TPP Supporters Whine About Failure Of Fast Track, Why Is No One Suggesting Increased... - 0 views
2More
USA Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go Fro... - 0 views
3More
Linux Kernel 4.0.5 Is Out with x86, ARM, and XFS Improvements, Updated Drivers - Softpedia - 0 views
2More
Music Industry Wants Cross Border Pirate Site Blocks | TorrentFreak - 0 views
2More
With Comcast-Time Warner merger looming, AT&T will acquire DirectTV | Ars Technica - 0 views
2More
Driven by necessity, Mozilla to enable HTML5 DRM in Firefox | Ars Technica - 0 views
2More
Global Net Neutrality Coalition | Blog | Access - 0 views
2More
Piracy ≠ Theft? Movie Industry Workers Speak Out | TorrentFreak - 0 views
5More
Thunderclap: Free Information from Space Outernet for Aug 11, 2014 - 0 views
2More
Movie Boss Loses the Plot Over ISP Piracy Liability | TorrentFreak - 0 views
3More
Apple Patents Technology to Legalize P2P Sharing | TorrentFreak * - 1 views
2More
State of VoIP in Linux - Datamation - 0 views
2More
Experts worry governments, 'commercial pressures' will undermine online freedom | PCWorld - 0 views
‹ Previous
21 - 40 of 268
Next ›
Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page