Mike Masnick writes:
So we already wrote about how the House completely watered down the USA Freedom Act to the point that it really does very little, leading basically all of the civil liberties community to withdraw their support for the bill. If you want to know a little more about the politics at play, I highly recommend Jennifer Granick’s explanation, in which she notes the unfortunate reality: this bill no longer ends bulk surveillance at all — and, in fact, appears to authorize some things that were previously considered questionable, such as the NSA’s ability to do “about” searches, rather than just “to” and “from” searches (i.e., rather than just looking for emails from or to a certain person, they want access to emails aboutthat person too).
You may have noticed that while all of the various civil liberties groups have pulled their support — they have not urged lawmakers to vote against this bill. While there is some fairly contentious debates going on over whether or not some of these groups should go that far, they’ve basically been painted into a corner.
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