NSA’s domestic data slurping now expired

Good day all. Last week we saw a fight going on between the two houses of Congress, more specifically, the police state totalitarians and those who actually think the Government needs a warrant to go after people’s data.

The amazing part about this is the people supporting and opposing crosses the political aisle. Of course the reasons that some Democrats and Some Republicans are after the same thing are quite different. In any case, the congressional authorization, which was already ruled unconstitutional, has lapsed and now the NSA is forbidden from snarfing up the data of Americans. Here are some of the details from My Way.com:

The National Security Agency has begun winding down its collection and storage of American phone records after the Senate failed to agree on a path forward to change or extend the once-secret program ahead of its expiration at the end of the month.

Considering that not one single Islamic terrorist attack has been stopped by this data trolling, shutting this program down won’t make one single difference defending America. Now going after communications overseas is still fair game and also expected.

In a chaotic scene during the wee hours of Saturday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill known as the USA Freedom Act, which would have ended the NSA’s bulk collection but preserved its ability to search the records held by the phone companies on a case-by-case basis. The bill was backed by President Barack Obama, House Republicans and the nation’s top law enforcement and intelligence officials.

And this bill was opposed by the RINO contingent, lead by that fraud, Mitch McConnell. McConnell has been working to ram the reauthorization of the Patriot act through the Senate.

It fell just three votes short of the 60 needed for passage. All the “no” votes but one were cast by Republicans, some of whom said they thought the USA Freedom Act didn’t go far enough to help the NSA maintain its capabilities.

Those were probably the ones who want the NSA to be able to hack into people’s computers, activate their webcams and generally toss the 4^th Amendment into the trash. Then McConnell tried to push through an extension of the current Patriot act. That didn’t work out to well for him.

If Senate Republican leaders were counting on extending current law and continuing the negotiations, they miscalculated. Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans refused to go along. A bill to grant a two-month extension of the law failed, and senators objected to each attempt by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky offer up a short term extension.

One of the people who threw the roadblock in front of McClothead’s plan to toss the Constitution was the Junior Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul.

Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky’s other senator and a Republican presidential candidate, called the Senate’s failure to allow an extension of the surveillance programs a victory for privacy rights. “We should never give up our rights for a false sense of security,” Paul said in a statement.

Senator Paul is paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin, who said:

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

And thanks to Edward Snowden, people are finally understanding just what the NSA, the Bush Administration, The Obama Administration and certain members of Congress were doing. Upholding their oaths to the Constitution wasn’t one the things they were doing.

Some civil liberties groups joined Paul in praising the result, saying they would rather see the Patriot Act provision authorizing NSA phone collection expire altogether. “For the first time, a majority of senators took a stand against simply rubber-stamping provisions of the Patriot Act that have been used to spy on Americans,” said Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

It’s a sad day when I agree with the ACLU about something, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. This is one of those times the ACLU was correct. One of the reasons that so many in Congress are looking to repeal or at least rewrite what is known as Section 215 of the Patriot act, besides getting an earful from their constituents, is that very few of them actually knew what the NSA was doing. The whole thing was buried under “National Security” and until Snowden released the records, no one really knew what they were up to.

Most people, myself included, assumed that the NSA was snarfing up people’s meta data. They just assumed, as I did, that they had a filtering system and a policy on how to handle information they weren’t legally entitled to collect. Boy were we all wrong!

Now, McClownnell is going to have to call back the Senate to try and get the Patriot reauthorized. While he might shove it through the Senate, there is an awful lot of opposition in the house. Speaker of the House John “Spineless” Boehner, who will cave into Democrats at the drop of a hat, might find it impossible to get the Patriot act as it now stand through the House of Representatives. Frankly, I consider that a good thing. There are a few sections that do make sense and really aren’t all that controversial. These should be broken out and passed as separate bills. However, I don’t see common sense making an appearance anywhere in Washington. So the Patriot Act can stay nice and dead.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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