Proposal to restrict NSA phone-tracking program defeated
A controversial proposal to restrict how the National Security Agency collects Americans’ telephone records failed to advance in the House by a narrow margin Wednesday, a victory for the Obama administration, which has spent weeks defending the program.Lawmakers voted 217 to 205 to defeat the proposal from an unlikely coalition of liberal and conservative members. Those lawmakers had joined forces in response to revelations by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, that the agency has collected the phone records of millions of Americans — a practice that critics say goes beyond the kind of collection that has been authorized by Congress.
The plan, sponsored by Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), would have restricted the collection of the records, known as metadata, only when there was a connection to relevant ongoing investigations. It also would have required that secret opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court be made available to lawmakers and that the court publish summaries of each opinion for public review.
My view:
Another sad day for the constitutional protection of civil liberties.
Lawmakers have steadily eroded freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and freedom of speech in recent years.
The Democratic party, the party of "enlightened" liberals, has once again voted for authoritarian eavesdropping, rather than upholding privacy rights.
While GW Bush and his "war on terror" initiated much of the current trend in liberty violations, the Obama administration takes it to new heights.
With our present surveillance technology, privacy will soon be completely eliminated unless trends are reversed soon, giving the US government powers and information gathering capabilities beyond the wildest fantasies of the notorious Soviet Communists and German Fascists.
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