There is growing annoyance among advocates of significant NSA reform that the USA Freedom Act, initially the “good” reform bill competing with one that actually expanded the powers of the NSA to snoop on Americans, has been increasingly watered down to be more palatable to the rest of Congress.
The FISA constitutional advocate is gone, as is the language allowing more disclosure from tech companies about data requests. The bill continues to go under the knife, and the desperate push to get it to the House floor may effectively remove anything that made it worth pushing for in the first place.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D – VT), author of the Senate version, is not a big fan of what’s happening in the House, and says he won’t let the same thing happen in the Senate. Whether he can make good on that promise remains to be seen, however.
Meanwhile, even reform as such is coming under growing attack from surveillance enthusiasts like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D – CA), who today condemned critics of the “data collection program,” saying it is necessary because of terrorism. Though Feinstein claimed to object to the term “surveillance,” to describe the program, she has described the program that way in her own campaign literature in the past.
Hardly news, Jason, unfortunately.
But it's one of those fill-in-the-blanks stories as they follow their regular trademark.
Of course it is. Question, have we convinced every single member of Congress that they'll lose their next election, this fall for most, if they don't reign in or abolish the NSA? Is every member of Congress seeing primary opponents and independent candidates for the general election all running to take their seat away from them if they don't abolish the NSA? If the answer is no to those questions, then of course they are gutting NSA reform. The powerful want it gutted, and we're doing nothing to make them pay a political price for doing so, so of course they are gutting it.
Regardless of how the lacerate the bill, even if all they leave untouched is the title, Leahy will sign it. Despite his public rhetoric advocating the citizen's rights to privacy, he's one of the Empire Builders and will, in the end, do what his masters demand.
Feinstein's outrage at finding herself and her staff to be targets of surveillance was short lived. As expected, she's all for the surveillance of everyone who is not a member of the criminal class that infests Washington, District of Criminals.
Reforming the NSA is about as useful as "repurposing" nuclear waste. The surveillance state needs to be dismantled, fully, and its IT infrastructure destroyed, beyond any hope of repair. A nuke dropped on the server farm in Utah would be a good idea.