Plenty more work to do toward reclaiming our lost liberties and protecting our privacy
Ronald Bailey|Jun. 5, 2015 9:09 am
Thanks to the whistleblowing of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden two years ago, the USA Freedom Act passed earlier this week reining in that agency’s massive domestic surveillance program. The program collected the metadata of practically all of the telephone calls that Americans make to each other. Metadata tells the agency to whom, when, where, and for how long you talked on your telephone. While government officials scaremongered that the program was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, they could point to not a single example how this program stopped any terrorist activity.
The American Civil Liberties Union is circulating a message from Snowden that makes these salient points …
… arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say. ….
Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.
We need to push back and challenge the lawmakers who defend these programs. We need to make it clear that a vote in favor of mass surveillance is a vote in favor of illegal and ineffective violations of the right to privacy for all Americans. …
We can’t take the right to privacy for granted, just like we can’t take the right to free speech for granted. We can’t let these invasions of our rights stand.
The ACLU adds:
While USA Freedom Act is a start, no one should mistake it for comprehensive reform – it leaves many of the government’s most intrusive surveillance powers untouched, and it leaves disclosure and transparency loopholes
https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/05/edward-snowdens-victory-dance-op-ed
