After the 9-11 attacks on The World Trade Center Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Shanksville, PA, Congress quickly and without much discussion, passed the Patriot Act, the single biggest spying operation likely ever. Under the Patriot Act, the government was able to collect information on Internet traffic, mostly of foreigners. The amount of data that […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or FISA Court has affirmed that the Feds do not need a warrant to search your email. Of course, if that email is encrypted – not like GMail, but with real encryption – then while they may have the FISA court’s permission to look at it, they will have to […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]UPDATED: 02 Jun 2015 2216 EDT The Senate, in a 67-32 vote, passed the same bill they were unable to pass before they went on vacation, restoring some of the expired provisions of the Patriot Act. The bill now goes to President Obama who said he would sign it. Gone is the bulk collection of […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]As expected, Congress was not able to come to a consensus regarding renewing three provisions of the Patriot Act, which expired about 30 minutes ago. The three provisions – bulk data collection of metadata of all phones calls in the U.S., roving wiretap warrants (warrants on people, rather than a particular phone number) and the […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]The DoJ IG just released an assessment of the FBI’s use of the mass data collection powers of section 215 of The Patriot Act, renewal of which is currently being debated in Congress and the report says that no case developments resulted from the use of Section 215 orders. The Inspector General said: “As with our […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]HR 4681, the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2015 was signed into law on December 19th, 2014 and provides funding for the intelligence community until next September. The bill and now law contains one section – section 309 – that deals with the collection, retention and sharing of information collected by the intelligence community. Because […]
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