US News House effort would completely dismantle Patriot Act

[tom_mai78101]

A pair of House lawmakers wants to completely repeal the Patriot Act and other legal provisions to dramatically rein in American spying.

Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) on Tuesday unveiled their Surveillance State Repeal Act, which would overhaul American spying powers unlike any other effort to reform the National Security Agency.


“This isn’t just tinkering around the edges,” Pocan said during a Capitol Hill briefing on the legislation. “This is a meaningful overhaul of the system, getting rid of essentially all parameters of the Patriot Act.”

The bill would completely repeal the Patriot Act, the sweeping national security law passed in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, as well as the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, another spying law that the NSA has used to justify collecting vast swaths of people's communications through the Internet.


It would also reform the secretive court that oversees the nation’s spying powers, prevent the government from forcing tech companies to create “backdoors” into their devices and create additional protections for whistleblowers.

Read more here. (The Hill)

 

[Accname]

Yeah, as if.

 

[FireCat]

Hmm, I don't see how the Patriot Acts can be dismantled.

 

[tom_mai78101]

I liked to stand to the side and see how it goes.

 

[Slapshot136]

Not sure it matters how legal it is as long as it's kept secret enough (and lets face it, the people doing the spying would be experts in knowing how to keep stuff secret), and the government doesn't exactly have the best track record of enforcing the laws against itself