Federal Agencies Routinely Spy On Phone Calls, Texts, Emails Of American Citizens, Experts Say | ZeroHedge
Often working in collaboration with private companies and banks, agencies like the FBI have been misusing laws against foreign terrorism to vacuum up and sift through the private data of millions of Americans without a warrant or any evidence of a crime.
As Congress now debates reauthorizing relevant sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that are set to expire this year, the libertarian Cato Institute held a four-day conference last week, which featured calls for major legal reforms by conservative and liberal speakers alike.
The violations that we ve seen have not just been epic in scale, but they ve also been persistent, over and over again, Jake Laperruque, a deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told attendees.
To put a human scale on this, what we re talking about is not just random typos or wrong clicks; we re looking at things like pulling up batches of thousands of political donors in one go, without any suspicion of wrongdoing, Laperruque said. We ve had reports of journalists, political commentators, a domestic political party; these compliance violations are the most worrisome type of politically focused surveillance.
Into our lives, without permission.
From phone records to internet lore,
Our private lives, an open door.
Data brokers rise with a fearsome clatter,
Trading your secrets, as if they don’t matter.
Faces from the web, plucked for review,
In databases vast, out of the blue.
Billion of photos, stripped from the net,
Faces and names, in profiles set.
A world where anyone can be seen,
In a flash, on a digital screen.
And so, it seems, from East to West,
The notion of privacy’s put to test.
In the land of the free, a paradox arises,
As surveillance unearths, what privacy disguises.