Monkey Funsters! Mother Fuckers! First the FCC executed their power grab over the Internet "in the name of equity" and now this bullshit.
'Eyes Everywhere': Congress Is About to Vote to Expand Mass Surveillance of Americans, Experts WarnThe U.S. House Intelligence Committee has proposed a reform bill that privacy experts are warning would significantly expand the government’s mass surveillance apparatus.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Reform and Reauthorization Act would be the “biggest expansion of surveillance inside the United States since the Patriot Act,” which was implemented in the wake of the 9/11 attack to combat terrorism, said Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“There would be eyes everywhere,” Goitein told Motherboard in a phone call. “Any entity that you visit as a customer, that provides Wi-Fi service, could be required to let the government tap into its equipment, and pull out entire streams of communications.”
Experts point to one provision in the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act as evidence that it could lead to a massive expansion of the U.S. domestic surveillance apparatus. It expands the definition of “electronic communication service provider”—the entities which the government can compel to assist in surveillance, such as an email service—to include any “equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store such communications.”
Both EPIC and the Brennan Center are warning that this could be as basic as an ordinary Wi-Fi router at a cafe or library.
“Any business that has access to ‘equipment’ on which communications are stored and transmitted would be fair game,” the organizations’ joint statement reads. “That means hotels, libraries, coffee shops, and other businesses that provide wifi could be compelled to serve as surrogate spies, structuring their systems so that they can give the government access to entire communications streams. Conscripting U.S. business into intelligence agencies’ service was a feature of the 2007 Protect America Act; Congress explicitly and appropriately rejected this feature one year later when it passed Section 702.”
How about about every computer or network device in your home?
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