Please read this brief excerpt from a 12-28-12 article entitled "Congress
Disgracefully Approves the FISA Warrantless Spying Bill for Five More Years,
Rejects All Privacy Amendments" by Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation:
Today, after just one day of rushed debate, the
Senate shamefully voted
on a five-year extension to the FISA Amendments Act, an unconsitutional law
that openly allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans' overseas
communications.
Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the
proposed amendments that would have brought a modicum of transparency and
oversight to the government's activities, despite previous refusals by the
Executive branch to even estimate how many Americans are surveilled by this
program or reveal critical secret court rulings interpreting it.
The common-sense amendments the Senate hastily
rejected were modest in scope and written with the utmost deference to national
security concerns. The Senate had months to consider them, but waited until
four days before the law was to expire to bring them to the floor, and then
used the contrived time crunch to stifle any chances of them passing.
Sen. Ron Wyden's amendment would not have taken
away any of the NSA's powers, it just would have forced intelligence agencies
to send Congress a report every year detailing how their surveillance was
affecting ordinary Americans. Yet Congress voted to be purposely kept in the
dark about a general estimate of how many Americans have been spied on.
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