You Call This Reform?

NSA Would Gain Access to All Cellphone Records Under Dual Plans

VIRAL VIDEO

Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel

Big Brother’s access surveilling your private activities
just got worse under the guise of ‘reform’.

The White House and the House Intelligence Committee leaked dueling proposals last night that are supposedly aimed at ending the mass collection of all Americans’ phone records.

But the devil is in the details, and when it comes to the National Security Agency’s unique ability to twist and distort the English language, the devil wraps his horns around every word.

The National Security Agency would lose its authority to collect and hold years’ worth of telephone calling records– but gain access to all cellphone information it currently lacks under dual Obama administration and House proposals aimed at quieting controversy over the spy agency’s data archive.

The House proposal, to be unveiled this morning by Reps Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, is the more worrying of the two.

Rogers has been the NSA’s most ardent defender in Congress and has a long history of distorting the truth and practicing outright fabrication, whether in touting his committee’s alleged “oversight” or by way of his attempts to impugn the motives of the once again vindicated whistleblower who started this whole reform debate, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

As a general rule, whenever Mike Rogers (not to be confused with incoming NSA director Michael Rogers) claims a bill does something particular– like, say, protect your privacy– it’s actually a fairly safe assumption that the opposite will end up true. His new bill seems to have the goal of trading government bulk collection for even more NSA power to search Americans’ data while it sits in the hands of the phone companies.

The new House proposal would end the NSA’s practice of holding the massive amounts of calling data. It is slyly called the “End Bulk Collection Act.”

Administration officials hope to assuage public concerns that an intelligence agency had access to information that could reveal deeply private information. Though NSA does not obtain the contents of communications under the program, the ability to map a person’s communications with times, dates and numbers called can provide a window into someone’s activities and connections.

Both Administration and House plans offer benefits for the NSA that might give privacy advocates pause.

Currently, the NSA collects most landline calling records and stores them for five years in a database that it periodically searches using telephone numbers connected to terrorists abroad. The new proposals would expand the universe of calling records the agency can access.

After months of suggesting that they were collecting all the calling metadata, U.S. officials disclosed last month that a large segment of mobile phone calls were not covered by the program, and that as a result the NSA may only collect 30% of all call data in the country.

Under the new arrangement, phone companies would be required to hold and standardize their data and make all calls available on a continuously updated basis so the NSA could search it for “terrorist connections.”

The NSA would have to obtain a court order for such a search, said an official who confirmed details of the program on condition of anonymity.

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You call this reform? This is government bulk collection at its worst, and these new ‘reforms’ aren’t nearly good enough. There’s a simple way to stop all forms of bulk collection and mass surveillance: write a law expressly prohibiting it.

Big Brother knows no bounds when it comes to spying on innocent Americans. We have met the enemy– and it is us.