{"id":17046,"date":"2016-01-28T11:33:22","date_gmt":"2016-01-28T16:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17046"},"modified":"2016-01-28T11:33:38","modified_gmt":"2016-01-28T16:33:38","slug":"congressional-hearings-on-surveillance-programs-to-kick-off-in-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17046","title":{"rendered":"Congressional Hearings on Surveillance Programs to Kick Off \u2014 in Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Congressional Hearings on Surveillance Programs to Kick Off \u2014 in Secret<\/a><\/h3>\n
The House Judiciary Committee will\u00a0hold its first hearing next week<\/a>\u00a0on two of the NSA spying programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden that vacuum up domestic content despite being ostensibly targeted at foreigners: PRISM and Upstream.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

But, to the great consternation of 26 government accountability groups who wrote an\u00a0angry letter<\/a>\u00a0to committee leaders on Wednesday, the public is not invited. The entire hearing is classified, and closed.<\/p>\n

Section 702<\/a>\u00a0of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008, which has been cited as the legal authority for those two programs, lapses next year.<\/p>\n

The debate over whether to reauthorize it is expected to be the most substantive public examination of the NSA\u2019s surveillance regime since Congress\u2019s decision to\u00a0end NSA\u2019s collection of bulk metadata<\/a>\u00a0of U.S. phone calls.<\/p>\n

Kicking off that debate with a closed hearing sets the wrong tone, groups including openthegovernment.org and the ACLU wrote in their letter. \u201cIt continues the excessive secrecy that has contributed to the surveillance abuses we have seen in recent years and to their adverse effects upon both our civil liberties and economic growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The authors of the letter reminded the committee that discussions over the original passage of the FISA Amendments Act in 2008 \u201chappened largely in open session,\u201d\u00a0and that matters of national security are often discussed in open hearings, with classified briefings reserved for specific questions.<\/p>\n

Specifically, they wrote, \u201cIn the case of Section 702 implementation oversight, a completely closed hearing is unnecessary to provide members with an adequate understanding of how the law is currently implemented by the executive branch and whether that exceeds Congress\u2019s original intent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two programs that run under Section 702 vacuum up hundreds of millions of online messages and voice communications, including emails, Skype calls, and Facebook messages, that involve\u00a0\u201ctargeted\u201d suspects overseas and the people they talk to.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congressional Hearings on Surveillance Programs to Kick Off \u2014 in Secret The House Judiciary Committee will\u00a0hold its first hearing next week\u00a0on two of the NSA spying programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden that vacuum up domestic content despite being ostensibly targeted at foreigners: PRISM and Upstream. But, to the great consternation of 26 government accountability […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12031,249,12032,11950,577,1694,765,5567,8334,1796],"class_list":["post-17046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-congressional-hearings","tag-edward-snowden","tag-house-judiciary-committee","tag-jenna-mclaughlin","tag-nsa","tag-prism","tag-surveillance","tag-the-intercept","tag-upstream","tag-us-congress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17046"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17048,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17046\/revisions\/17048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}