Robert Scheer: Be Thankful For the People Struggling to Limit NSA Spying
from truthdig:
Be Thankful For the People Struggling to Limit NSA Spying
Posted on Nov 19, 2013
By Robert Scheer
On Monday the Supreme Court, ruling on an emergency petition, declined to do the right thing and hear a case challenging the massive government surveillance of Americans, revealed by the leaks from Edward Snowden. For the time being, the court acceded to the Obama administrations argument that it has the legal right to continue its unprecedented bulk collection of American phone records without any restraint. That throws the ball back to Congress, where a historic battle, crossing party lines, is already underway.
On one starkly polarizing side is the dark figure of Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat and reigning chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. One of the first to denounce Snowden for treason for letting the public know the ugly truths about government spying she had long concealed, Feinstein already has pushed a bill though her committee that provides the NSAs spying with additional legal cover.
It validates the backdoor search provision that the government, including domestic organizations such as the FBI, has misused to justify sifting through material ostensibly collected for foreign intelligence investigations to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
For the first time, the statue would explicitly allow the government to proactively search through the NSA data troves of information without a warrant, the ACLUs Michelle Richardson told The Guardian on Friday. She added, This Fourth Amendment back door needs to be closed, not written into stone. .......................(more)
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/be_thankful_for_the_people_struggling_to_limit_nsa_spying_20131119