Obama about-face: Prez wants to reinstate NSA mass surveillance program after pledging to end it
(NaturalNews) President Obama has recently signed legislation called the USA Freedom Act, which seeks to put limits on how much personal data on Americans the National Security Agency can collect en masse. But many view the new law as just another head fake by an administration that, truth be told, tasked the NSA with far wider surveillance powers than the Bush Administration.
As reported by Britain's Guardian newspaper, the Obama White House has indicated that it intends to use a portion of the USA Freedom Act that bans bulk collection of U.S. phone records to actually restart the bulk collection of U.S. phone records.
U.S. officials told the paper that, in the days after Obama signed the legislation, the White House approached the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, to revive the program, which has actually been deemed unconstitutional by a separate federal court, in the name of "transitioning" domestic spying activities to telecom firms that generate the "call detail records" to which the government wants access.
