dChan
Anonymous ID: 42e312 March 4, 2020, 9:18 a.m. No.8316610   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6782

Eyes on

 

Anons - keep an eye on the "emergency legislation" around Corona. The Fake News is cranking up fear and certain unconstitutional surveillance powers are set to expire in March.

 

CORONAVIRUS SPENDING BILL COULD BE USED TO CEMENT SPYING POWERS, SURVEILLANCE CRITICS IN CONGRESS WARNED

 

sauce: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/27/coronavirus-spending-bill-surveillance-patriot-act/

 

"THE CONGRESSIONAL EFFORT to rein in the government’s surveillance powers before a looming deadline on March 15 could run up against a new opponent: a new coronavirus.

 

House Democrats have been working on plans to further amend a provision of the Patriot Act, which as of 2015 provides a way for the government to get American citizens’ phone records from telecom companies. This and other key provisions of the Patriot Act must be reauthorized by March 15, or the surveillance authority lapses. The Democrats’ amended bill would pull the provision’s authorization while allowing and tweaking other ways the government collects records.

 

But those negotiations have been thrown off track, with critics of the spying program alarmed by the possibility that congressional leaders may try to use the coronavirus outbreak — and the coinciding legislation to fund a response — as a vehicle to muscle through an unamended extension or reauthorization.

 

The Trump administration’s request for $2.5 billion to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic is likely to become an unstoppable legislative vehicle — as must-pass legislation that congressional leaders of both parties could use to ram through a reauthorization of the FBI’s call detail records program. Such a move would sidestep the House’s reform effort and instead push through a clean reauthorization of the program.

 

The Senate, said a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is “threatening to put that clean reauthorization into something like coronavirus funding which would make it impossible to defeat if we don’t come up with a bill here. Pelosi and Schiff will never allow it to expire.”

…

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee had been scheduled to meet to vote on the product of closed-door negotiations between Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, his counterpart on the intelligence committee Rep. Adam Schiff, Republicans, and the intelligence community.

 

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who has been a lead civil liberties reformer on the committee, had said that she would introduce five amendments to the bill. Given that there is bipartisan skepticism of surveillance authority — Republicans have become increasingly opposed to it in the wake of the inspector general report into Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court abuses surrounding the Carter Page case — the amendments had a reasonable chance of success, opening the possibility that leadership would push forward with an Intelligence version of the bill and ditch the Judiciary legislation.

…

One major question mark hanging over the process this time is what type of changes Trump loyalists — who were highly critical of the FBI’s handling of investigations into Trump associates — may demand. Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rand Paul have both signaled a desire for some type of reform, with Paul tweeting that he “spoke with Trump,” and that the FISA Court — the secret court which approves certain types of surveillance requests from the intelligence community — should be “forbidden from ever spying on or investigating Americans.”"