By Cliff Montgomery – May 28th, 2015
Last weekend, the Senate defeated every legislative attempt to extend a controversial section of the so-called ‘Patriot Act’, which federal officials offer as a justification for the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive data collection of Americans’ telephone records.
The NSA program collects information on huge numbers of people, often those who are not suspected of committing a crime.
Lawmakers rejected “a House bill overhauling the NSA, a two-month Patriot Act [Section 215] extension and then increasingly short extensions of the law,” declared Dow Jones Newswires on May 24th.
“Primarily due to objections from presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) the Senate couldn’t agree to pass even a 24-hour extension” of Section 215, added the newswire service.
The Senate will again debate an extension of Section 215 of the so-called ‘Patriot Act ’ on May 31st. If it fails to pass any extension of the law during that session, then the legal justification for the NSA’s massive phone spying program will by default expire at midnight, June 1st.
Earlier this month, a U.S. appeals court ruled that the NSA’s massive collection of telephone records is illegal.
“A provision of the USA Patriot Act permitting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to collect business records deemed relevant to a counter-terrorism investigation cannot be legitimately interpreted to permit the systematic bulk collection of domestic calling records,” declared the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.
The judges’ ruling overturned a 2013 decision on the matter. But the appeals court did not go so far as to declare the entire program unconstitutional. It simply urged Congress to change the manner of data collection, so that it might fit U.S. constitutional standards.
The NSA’s data collection program was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who had worked as a contractor for the agency. After Snowden revealed the existence of the illegal program, shame-faced American politicians screamed for his head. He left the United States to escape political retaliation, and currently resides in Russia.
The illegal government program collects information on massive numbers of people, including those who are not suspected of committing a crime. The data program records the phone numbers those individuals contacted throughout the day, and the times during which those calls were made. It apparently does not record the content of those conversations.
