After passing the House last week and the Senate on Thursday, President Trump has signed the FISA 702 bill, renewing the section of FISA that allows the NSA to engage in mass surveillance of Americans’ Internet communications without a warrant.
The bill faced some bipartisan resistance, as promised reforms and safeguards never materialized, or were dismissed by Congressional leadership on the grounds that they would weaken the broad ability of the NSA to operate unchecked with Americans’ data.
President Trump claimed the bill is “the right thing for our country,” but falsely claimed this is “not the same FISA law that was so wrongly abused during the election,” even though the bill is for all intents and purposes identical to the previous version.
Indeed, the only material change at all was requiring the NSA to have a warrant for certain surveillance if the target happened to already be under criminal investigation. This has ironically led critics to note that the new version offers protections to suspected criminals that the rest of the public simply don’t get.
Figures that Trump doesn’t mind spying now that he’s spymaster-in-chief for the forseeable future
Yeah, amazin’, ain’t it? I distinctly remember Trump being “outraged” about spying on Americans…during the campaign. Perhaps things changed when he was “read on” to the MICC Plan of Acquisition.
Nothing so sophisticated.
Trump probably knows of things like the contents of the still-unreleased FISA memo detailing the Obama era spygame abuses against him and figures its their turn now. ‘His’ spies probably wants those powers extended, and that would probably be the only convincing argument they need to convince Trump.
The Intercept notes that the same Dems who routinely denounce Trump as a lawless authoritarian also voted to restore to him those powers.
Democracy at work…
…Bush,Clinton,Bush,Obama,Trump… All the same. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. And irony of ironies is that it works! Idiotic people still think that having their slave-master of choice at the whip somehow makes their slavery acceptable if not downright patriotic.
The competition for power, wealth and recognition while made up of individuals, it is the sytem they protect.
None dare nor want any chance of that systems power to be lowered to a point that the populace at large if given ability to interfere, because it threatens them.
The surveillance is protection of power, power wielded not by institutionalize Depts but from non elected sources.
If Trump really was fighting the “Deep State”, he would have vetoed this assault on our privacy rights.