In less than 60 days, Congress - whether they like it or not - will be forced to decide if the NSA’s most notorious mass surveillance program lives or dies. And today, over 30 civil liberties organizations launched a nationwide call-in campaign urging them to kill it.
Despite doing almost everything in their power to avoid voting for substantive NSA reform, Congress now has no choice: On 1 June, one of the most controversial parts of the Patriot Act - known as Section 215 - will expire unless both houses of Congress affirmatively vote for it to be reauthorized.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act was the subject of the very first Snowden story, when the Guardian reported that the US government had reinterpreted the law in complete secrecy, allowing the NSA to vacuum up every single American’s telephone records - who they called, who called them, when, and for how long - regardless of whether they had been accused of a crime or not. (The NSA’s warped interpretation of Section 215 was also the subject of John Oliver’s entire show on Sunday night. It is a must-watch.)
The massive phone dragnet is not the only thing Section 215 is used for though. As independent journalist Marcy Wheeler has meticulously documented, Section 215 is likely being used for all sorts of surveillance that the public has no idea about. There are an estimated 180 orders from the secret Fisa court that involve Section 215, but we know only five of them are directed at telecom companies for the NSA phone program. To give you a sense of the scale: the one Fisa order published by the Guardian from the Snowden trove compelled Verizon to hand over every phone record that it had on all its millions of customers. Every single one.
While the government claims that its other uses of Section 215 are “critical” to national security, it’s extremely hard to take their word for it. After all, the government lied about collecting information on millions of Americans under Section 215 to begin with. Then they claimed the phone surveillance program was “critical” to national security after it was exposed. That wasn’t true either: they later had to admit it has never stopped a single terrorist attack.
We also just learned two weeks ago that the NSA knew the program was largely pointless before the Snowden leaks and debated shutting it down altogether. Suddenly, after the Snowden documents became public, NSA officials defended it as “critical” again when they had to go before an increasingly skeptical Congress.
Is Section 215 being used to collect massive amounts of other data on Americans? Well, the New York Times reported last year that there are multiple different bulk collection programs under different authorities that are still secret. And Ron Wyden, while not specifying which law was being used, indicated in an interview last month that there were several spying programs directly affecting Americans that were still secret. And there’s evidence to suggest they’re doing so for supposed “cyber” crime investigations.
...
Despite doing almost everything in their power to avoid voting for substantive NSA reform, Congress now has no choice: On 1 June, one of the most controversial parts of the Patriot Act - known as Section 215 - will expire unless both houses of Congress affirmatively vote for it to be reauthorized.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act was the subject of the very first Snowden story, when the Guardian reported that the US government had reinterpreted the law in complete secrecy, allowing the NSA to vacuum up every single American’s telephone records - who they called, who called them, when, and for how long - regardless of whether they had been accused of a crime or not. (The NSA’s warped interpretation of Section 215 was also the subject of John Oliver’s entire show on Sunday night. It is a must-watch.)
The massive phone dragnet is not the only thing Section 215 is used for though. As independent journalist Marcy Wheeler has meticulously documented, Section 215 is likely being used for all sorts of surveillance that the public has no idea about. There are an estimated 180 orders from the secret Fisa court that involve Section 215, but we know only five of them are directed at telecom companies for the NSA phone program. To give you a sense of the scale: the one Fisa order published by the Guardian from the Snowden trove compelled Verizon to hand over every phone record that it had on all its millions of customers. Every single one.
While the government claims that its other uses of Section 215 are “critical” to national security, it’s extremely hard to take their word for it. After all, the government lied about collecting information on millions of Americans under Section 215 to begin with. Then they claimed the phone surveillance program was “critical” to national security after it was exposed. That wasn’t true either: they later had to admit it has never stopped a single terrorist attack.
We also just learned two weeks ago that the NSA knew the program was largely pointless before the Snowden leaks and debated shutting it down altogether. Suddenly, after the Snowden documents became public, NSA officials defended it as “critical” again when they had to go before an increasingly skeptical Congress.
Is Section 215 being used to collect massive amounts of other data on Americans? Well, the New York Times reported last year that there are multiple different bulk collection programs under different authorities that are still secret. And Ron Wyden, while not specifying which law was being used, indicated in an interview last month that there were several spying programs directly affecting Americans that were still secret. And there’s evidence to suggest they’re doing so for supposed “cyber” crime investigations.
...
Ending phone record surveillance is the first step to reining in surveillance abuses by the NSA. Please join us in making this the year we stand for privacy and liberty, not secrecy and fear.
Why you should care about phone record surveillance:
It violates the privacy of millions of innocent people. The NSA and FBI use Section 215 to collect the phone records of millions of people who have never even been suspected or accused of a crime.
It's unconstitutional and illegal. Section 215 of the Patriot Act was re-interpreted in complete secrecy to allow the surveillance of everyone without suspicion. One federal judge who ruled on the program’s legality after it was revealed to the public called it “beyond Orwellian” and “likely unconstitutional.”
It doesn’t make us any safer. The NSA has defended the phone metadata program by saying it has stopped terrorist attacks, but that claim has been repeatedly proven false. Even the White House’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has said, “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which [bulk collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act] made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”
For years, the United States government has been collecting every record of every phone call you make — when you call, whom you call, how long the call lasted, and how often you make those calls. This surveillance program affects hundreds of millions of regular people who have never done anything wrong, and it doesn’t matter if you’re calling your next-door neighbor or a family member halfway around the world.
But there’s good news: this mass surveillance program could end in the next few weeks.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act is set to expire on June 1, 2015. The Patriot Act and the reauthorizations that followed had myriad bad provisions. But it’s Section 215 of the original Patriot Act that the NSA re-interpreted in complete secrecy to allow them, with the help of the FBI, to collect millions of phone call records per day. The government could even try to use Section 215 for bulk collection of financial or other business records. With your help, we can stop Congress from simply rubber-stamping Patriot Act Section 215 — and stop this mass suspicionless surveillance program once and for all.
...
https://fight215.org/
Why you should care about phone record surveillance:
It violates the privacy of millions of innocent people. The NSA and FBI use Section 215 to collect the phone records of millions of people who have never even been suspected or accused of a crime.
It's unconstitutional and illegal. Section 215 of the Patriot Act was re-interpreted in complete secrecy to allow the surveillance of everyone without suspicion. One federal judge who ruled on the program’s legality after it was revealed to the public called it “beyond Orwellian” and “likely unconstitutional.”
It doesn’t make us any safer. The NSA has defended the phone metadata program by saying it has stopped terrorist attacks, but that claim has been repeatedly proven false. Even the White House’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has said, “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which [bulk collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act] made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”
For years, the United States government has been collecting every record of every phone call you make — when you call, whom you call, how long the call lasted, and how often you make those calls. This surveillance program affects hundreds of millions of regular people who have never done anything wrong, and it doesn’t matter if you’re calling your next-door neighbor or a family member halfway around the world.
But there’s good news: this mass surveillance program could end in the next few weeks.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act is set to expire on June 1, 2015. The Patriot Act and the reauthorizations that followed had myriad bad provisions. But it’s Section 215 of the original Patriot Act that the NSA re-interpreted in complete secrecy to allow them, with the help of the FBI, to collect millions of phone call records per day. The government could even try to use Section 215 for bulk collection of financial or other business records. With your help, we can stop Congress from simply rubber-stamping Patriot Act Section 215 — and stop this mass suspicionless surveillance program once and for all.
...
https://fight215.org/
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