From Rep. Rush Holt: Today Rep. Rush Holt introduced legislation to repeal federal surveillance laws that the government abused by collecting personal information on millions of Americans in violation of the Constitution, as revealed by a federal whistleblower and multiple media outlets last month. “As we now know, the National Security Agency and the Federal…
Category: U.S.
Amash amendment to NDAA to defund bulk records collection under Section 215 fails (updated)
By a vote of 205-217, Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to the defense appropriations bill failed in the House. The amendment would have blocked bulk records collection and would have limited the NSA to collecting records from U.S. persons only if they were the target of an investigation. That said, the vote was closer than I…
Class Claims Dating Sites Disclose HIV Statuses
William Dotinga reports: Dating website conglomerate SuccessfulMatch.com posts its customers’ HIV and STD statuses on thousands of its other websites, in violation of law and its own promises of confidentiality, a class action claims in Federal Court. […] “On the home page of PositiveSingles.com, defendant lured them in with empathetic sounding statements like ‘You feel…
NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails
By Justin Elliott ProPublica, July 23, 2013, 12:39 p.m. The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask…