House passes legislation to renew key NSA surveillance program after Trump’s contradictory tweets - Polidicks

[quote]The House voted decisively Thursday to reauthorize a powerful government authority to conduct foreign surveillance on U.S. soil, overcoming opposition from privacy advocates and confusion sown by a series of contradictory and seemingly misinformed tweets from President Trump questioning his own administration’s support for the program. The 256 to 164 vote on the bill sets up the measure for consideration in the Senate, where leaders have said they believe they can pass the bill before the program’s statutory authorization expires on Jan. 19. The legislation extends for six years the government’s ability to collect from U.S. companies the emails and other communications of foreign targets located outside the United States. The intelligence community considers the program, called Section 702 after the part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008 that established it, its key national security surveillance tool. But the fate of the program appeared to be in jeopardy Thursday morning, after the president tweeted his doubts about it, questioning his administration’s position after seeing a segment about it on Fox News. “‘House votes on controversial FISA ACT today,’” Trump wrote, citing a Fox News headline. “This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?” [/quote] [url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-backtracks-after-appearing-to-contradict-his-administrations-support-of-fisa/2018/01/11/5d7f7088-f6d1-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpfisa-10am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.f5705e47f8c1[/url]

Fuck this.

[quote]The legislation extends for six years the government’s ability to collect from U.S. companies the emails and other communications of foreign targets [b]located outside the United States.[/b][/quote] [quote]“This is the act that may have been used ... to so badly surveil and abuse[b] the Trump Campaign”[/b][/quote] Huh?

"Big government is bad unless we get to use it." -Republicans, literally always

[QUOTE=mcharest;53044544]Huh?[/QUOTE] It's actually common practice among the US, Canada, NZ, AU, UK, FR, & co to spy on each others civilians and to collectively share this information so they don't get caught spying on their own people. People who think their government actually protect them are ignorant.

[QUOTE=mcharest;53044544]Huh?[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=dingusnin;53044641]It's actually common practice among the US, Canada, NZ, AU, UK, FR, & co to spy on each others civilians and to collectively share this information so they don't get caught spying on their own people. People who think their government actually protect them are ignorant.[/QUOTE] That's not what happened here, but good on you for soapboxing anyways. The collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was discovered through surveillance of Russia. FISA only permits US intelligence agencies to gather intelligence on non-US persons, and any data involving US persons is sanitized. If there's a significant, justifiable interest to discover the identities of involved US persons, they can get a court order to reveal that information. Trump has tried to spin it as the Deep State abusing their power to deliberately spy on his administration. [url=https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-s-intel-officials-probe-ties-between-trump-adviser-and-kremlin-175046002.html]In reality[/url] it was a legitimate investigation into Russian political operations, which revealed information on Americans [i]actively participating[/i] in those operations.