The USA Can Watch You More And Better Now : Here Is How?

The National Security Agency, known as NSA for its acronym in English, will now have new powers to monitor electronic communications around the world. The United States Congress has approved extending the controversial section 702 of the so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, into a vote.

For the first time in 1978, FISA is a set of federal laws that allows agencies of US security to collect and use information from foreign powers in cases of espionage or terrorism. It is an extensive law with many ramifications and section 702, an amendment approved in 2008 by former President George W. Bush, is one of the most controversial points in the text.

This section recognizes the power of the NSA to intercept electronic communications without necessity. of a court order, with only one annual report specifying the reasons why surveillance is active. The amendment was about to be removed from the text during the vote on the so-called Act of Liberty of the United States. of 2015, under the mandate of Obama, but finally its consideration was postponed until this year, when it is a decade of its enactment.

Section 702, like the rest of the FISA texts, has clear references to its exclusive use on foreign objectives but its implementation has allowed the NSA to analyze for years, and with the support of large US companies and operators, Internet traffic as a whole, in It includes the communications that take place within the country. "The general problem with these programs is that they are far from being" specific ".

Under Section 702, the NSA collects billions of communications, including those belonging to innocent Americans that are not really the original target of surveillance, "argues the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization created to ensure the rights of Internet users. These communications, moreover, are stored in databases to which other domestic intelligence agencies, such as the FBI, can access without purposes related to national security and without a judicial order or judicial review. Under section 702, The NSA can ask large operators or companies such as Google or Facebook to intercept any message or data that contains information about a specific objective (a phone number or an email, for example). They can do so even if the message is not directed or issued by the subject in question, a practice that has generated several criticisms by the judicial bodies of the country Because that assumption was not clearly codified in the amendment.

The new ratification, which expands the program for six years, now clearly allows the agency to intercept these communications en masse. "This means six more years of FBI access to databases compiled by the NSA, for the purposes of domestic law enforcement, a routine that is far from the original justification for national security," says Cindy Cohn. , executive director of the EFF.

To further complicate matters, the new text is intentionally vague when it comes to demanding the data that the NSA must know to define an "objective" in its electronic surveillance tasks. phone, an email or a specific account in a social network, now a name is enough and only the US Congress he has the power to demand that he stop an investigation if he considers the measure unjustified.

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