The National Security Agency could be given expansive new surveillance powers under a proposed change to the FISA 702 bill — slated for a vote on April 19.
Strange that Snowden, of all people, is assuming the NSA is waiting for this bill to pass to do this stuff rather than them having done it for a very long time already.
Does he really think the NSA isn't already spying on people through things like public wifi?
My understanding is this will make public operators liable to participate. Like, they have to have infrastructure in place to do the recording for the NSA.
Like, they could mandate back doors in all equipment.
The NSA couldn’t really work in the US before this, but they were free and encouraged to work in foreign countries. You should look up how the “five eyes” actually worked, and ECHELON before it: Your data stored overseas is fair game for the NSA. Inside the country they needed a secret warrant to nab it.
They collected everything from the US but pretended they could only search comms with at least one non-US party without a warrant (there were no technical barriers to this and Snowden even claimed it would be easy for a low level NSA agent to read the President's emails). Foreigners may be easier to search without a warrant at the NSA, but using services outside the US gives a greater chance your data isn't in their database to begin with.
FISA authorizes a specific court to authorize warrants, the FISC, however the article looks directly at the NSAs role who is not affiliated with or charged by FISC, but through warrants and direction of the FBI. The FBI is not very scary since people normally associate them with protection of national interests, so instead the article only mentions who the tasking authority and holder of the warrant actually is. The article uses key terms specifically to get a reaction from a small subset as click bait without even providing accurate information about the topic. It's lazy and uninformative.