Trevor Timm writes: Since last year, a few members of Congress—led by Senator Ron Wyden—have been trying to get the Obama administration to answer a simple question: how many Americans’ phone calls or emails have been and are being collected and read without a warrant under the authority of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008…
Category: U.S.
Senate debate over cyber security bill fails to address privacy concerns
Mike Lapointe writes: Passage of the cybersecurity bill has stalled in the Senate as Democrats and Republicans show few signs of compromise over the scale of governmental provisions for infrastructural protection. But what’s most troubling about this ongoing debate has nothing to do with the extent of infrastructural protection called for by many observers. Energy…
License Plate Recognition Logs Our Lives Long Before We Sin
Jon Campbell of the L.A. Weekly has a chilling report in tomorrow’s edition on license plate readers used by California law enforcement and the “BOSS” database that is being developed. Here’s a snippet: L.A. Weekly has learned that more than two dozen law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County are using hundreds of these “automatic license…
NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You
Spencer Ackerman writes: The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so. That claim comes in a short letter…