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FISA court: FBI use of NSA's electronic surveillance data was illegal
A US court ruled that some of the FBI's electronic surveillance activities violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) deemed that FBI officials improperly searched a National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence database for info on Americans. The ruling was made last year but just revealed by the intelligence community today.
Trump signs bill extending NSA's warrantless surveillance
On Friday afternoon, just hours before Congress failed to avert a government shutdown, the President signed into law the "FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017." The bill passed the House and Senate earlier this week with the support of many Republicans and Democrats, offering only slight adjustments to Section 702, a law that oversees the NSA's ability to spy on "international terrorists, weapons proliferators, and other important foreign intelligence targets located outside the United States."
Senate votes to extend NSA’s warrantless surveillance program
Last week, the US House of Representatives voted to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that lets the National Security Agency monitor communications of non-US citizens living outside of the US. Today, the Senate has also voted in favor of renewing the law for another six years.
Senators propose 'USA Liberty Act' to reauthorize NSA surveillance
The question of how to rein in monitoring enabled by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been in the spotlight ever since the Edward Snowden PRISM revelations. What exactly to do about it has gone back and forth, but the latest attempt to "reform" surveillance is here in the form of the USA Liberty Act, a bipartisan proposal introduced by Senators Mike Lee and Patrick Leahy (PDF). The Washington Post figures it has little chance of passage, however, it does contain language that would make government agencies get a warrant before searching information collected by the NSA under Section 702.
Senators propose reforms to wide-reaching surveillance law
Eleven senators -- both Republican and Democrat -- introduced new legislation today that calls for substantial reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Reuters reports. Section 702 allows intelligence agencies to monitor the communications of foreign targets living outside of the US, but it also enables those agencies to collect information on US citizens if they happen to be in communication with the non citizens being monitored.
US intelligence wants to make a key foreign surveillance law permanent
The directors of America's federal intelligence agencies appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday in an effort to convince the governing body to permanently extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that enables the federal government to monitor the communications of non-US citizens on foreign soil who are communicating with Americans here in the United States regarding matters of national security. Essentially, it enabled the intelligence community to eavesdrop on conversations between suspected terrorists and their associates, even if some of them happen to be US citizens.
NYT: Yahoo reworked its malware scanner for email surveillance
Following a Reuters report that in 2015 Yahoo scanned customer emails for US surveillance, the New York Times has followed up with details from anonymous sources of its own. Although Yahoo responded a day later claiming the initial report was "misleading," the NYT sourced unnamed government officials claiming the company modified a system used to scan all incoming email for malware that stored matching messages and made them available to the FBI.
