Senate approves FISA spying bill - allows US intelligence agencies to wiretap without a warrant

Senate approves FISA spying bill

The Senate agreed on Friday to approve an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that allows the NSA and other US intelligence agencies to wiretap conversations involving foreign citizens without obtaining a warrant.

Despite growing opposition to one of the most notorious and secretive US spying programs, Senate voted 73-23 to extend powers of the government to wiretap people around the globe as well as Americans involved in international communication without even obtaining a warrant. Some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee offered several privacy fixes to the bill but they all were rejected by the Senate majority. Now President Obama has to sign the bill to extend warrantless wiretapping for another five years – until the end of 2017.

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Permalink Reply by Tara on December 28, 2012 at 4:49pm

LEAKED: White House's Bogus Talking Points On Why Senate Should Tra...

Want to know the White House's key propaganda lines for refusing to allow proper oversight into how the NSA is spying on us all? Well, sit back and read on, because the White House's "talking points" on why the Senate should reject four key amendments to try to roll back some of the excesses of the broad and massive secret program to collect tons of data on Americans, has been leaked. First, some background.

As we noted yesterday, there was a "debate" in the Senate concerning the FISA Amendments Act renewal, and four specific amendments that some Senators tried to add to it to make the renewal less problematic. If you haven't been following this whole mess, you can read back through our FISA Amendments Act stories here, but the short version is that this is the bill that "legalized" warrantless wiretapping -- and which (it has since been revealed) is likely being used by the NSA to collect reams of data on Americans, despite the bill's plain text suggesting that it can only be used on foreigners. At issue is that the FISA Court has apparently issued an "interpretation" of the bill, which allows for a very broad reading of the text -- so broad, that it likely contradicts what most people believe the bill says. Only a small group of people know what this secret interpretation is, and while sitting Senators and Congressional Reps can find out, most do NOT have staff members with the necessary clearance to explain it to them. For this reason, most of the people voting on this bill have no idea how it is being used, and sometimes argue that it is not being used in ways that it is almost certainly being used (i.e., to scoop up data on many Americans without warrants). These provisions -- the FAA for short -- were set to expire last year, but were renewed for one year, ostensibly to allow for "real" debate. Of course, despite having a whole year, no debate appeared, and instead we got yesterday's charade.

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Permalink Reply by Unemployed Storm trooper TK420 on December 28, 2012 at 6:04pm

Well , If you look at the big picture...that mean that if the American can declare openly that they can spy on the whole world because they have create a law that entitle them to do so...that mean that the whole world can create laws as well to spy on everyone so whoever they want in the US .