The NSA looks to end dragnet phone surveillance

[Don Giovanni]

https://reason.com/blog/2019/03/05/t...pped-the-domes

This was the program used to spy on Trump prior to the FBI taps and FISA warrants going back two decades when it first came into effect under Bush Jr. This program did not prevent any attempts of terrorism, which was the very reason it was brought into practice.

https://www.infowars.com/nsa-documen...nd-alex-jones/

[Filikieteria1821]

I remember in my high school government class, we had a discussion in regards to whether the patriot act was an invasion of privacy and if it was ever needed.

I was adamantly for it, citing that the government would use this as a necessary means to track all suspicious individuals and if you had nothing to hide then letting big brother listen in on your daily calls was no big deal.

Fast forward to now and it's very apparent to me that the patriot act that allowed for the spying of people was indeed an invasion of privacy, and under the thumb of the wrong person could turn ugly. We've seen that happen recently, and there's no telling how many others have been spied on.

The government isn't stupid and nor does it need the patriot act to know if someone is plotting an attack on the country, foreign or domestic.

[Don Giovanni]

Ron Paul sounds his skepticism:

[Don Giovanni]

Whistleblowers Say NSA Still Spies On American Phones In Hidden Program

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/whistleblowers-say-nsa-still-spies-on-american-phones-under-hidden-program-3aeaf457cd1f

Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the NSA who blew the whistle on illegal mass surveillance, waste and mismanagement at the agency several years before Snowden’s revelations, agreed that NSA phone surveillance “continues in other forms” in spite of the closure of this particular program.



Much has been made of the impending expiry of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, due this December, under which the current phone surveillance program is run. But Drake told me that the NSA simply doesn’t need the Freedom Act to authorise continued warrantless phone surveillance of American citizens in the homeland.

Surveillance can still continue, he said, “under yet other special, exigent, exceptional authorities and programs — including Section 702 and Executive Order 12333 — hiding in secret.”

Drake acknowledged that the NSA was also shifting toward adapting to widespread the changes in technology use, which could well have made the old program less than useful. “Communications using traditional land line and cell phone numbers and regular cellular text messaging is increasingly taken place on other messaging apps,” he added. “With respect to other authorities and cut outs, there are yet still other surveillance players and actors, too.”

In a series of tweets about the subject, Drake warned that the NSA’s recent history hardly vindicated the agency’s claims:

“All these domestic spying programs fundamentally violated the Constitution, FISA & 4th Amendment on a mass scale, then went under cover of secret FISC approval, secret interpretations of law & then passage of unconstitutional ex post facto laws to make them ‘legal’.”

(emphasis not mine)