A Civil Rights Firestorm Erupts Around a Looming Surveillance Power Grab: Dozens of advocacy groups are pressuring the US Congress to abandon plans to ram through the renewal of a controversial sur…::Dozens of advocacy groups are pressuring the US Congress to abandon plans to ram through the renewal of a controversial surveillance program that they say poses an “alarming threat to civil rights.”

    • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ah yes, I heard multiple podcasts on it in the defense sector defending it. There is a lot of lobbying I’m favor of it being renewed. Allegedly it only targets foreign agents, essentially terrorist operating abroad but using our internet infrastructure, so we intercept their messages. FBI can make requests for this information if they have a credible threat, in the past the threshold for request was low so agents were using it for cases that shouldn’t have been used for. The dragnet of data collection is indiscriminate, so your data as a citizen is still being collected anyways. There is also some mental gymnastics on why the FBI doesn’t need a search warrant (because the data was already collected so its a query not a search LOL) and apparently it already held up in court cases before.

      For those interested here it is:

      https://open.spotify.com/episode/5WVa0u04qWuqqtXBZHYUv0?si=Zvg0Lmh0RYOZ6pY4io7P2g