General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Do you support President Obama in regards to the recently disclosed NSA surveillance issue? [View all]On the Road
(20,783 posts)I can't figure out what is going on in spite of the dozen of threads.
At first people were saying the government is listening to their phone calls. That does not appear to be true. Some of the description in the Washington Post article sounds like the laws that were being voted on during the 2008 campaign -- US-to-international calls, international-to-international calls which pass through the US, FISA courts, etc.
I read that law and debated it on DU. Nothing in the wording appeared to do what its critics charged, and no one on DU could point to anything specifc. That is a major reason I am skeptical of the way this is being presented. I really do not think most of the critics have a detailed understanding of what is legal and illegal, or what it has been demonstrated that the NSA government is doing or not doing.
IIRC, the 2007 law allowed the federal government to collect widespread call data from the US to certain destinations, such a group of villages in Pakistan, after presenting a case to the FISA court and getting it approved. This is OK with me, even though it can be depicted as "MONITORING THE PHONE CALLS OF AMERICANS!!"
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