White House May Be Looking to Make NSA Wiretapping Permanent

The White House is reportedly seeking to make a temporary surveillance law, that enabled the National Security Agency to collect cell phone metadata in bulk, permanent in December, even though the NSA has abandoned the program.

The Washington Post and Greenwich Time both report that the White House has been discussing plans to extend a 2015 revision to the USA Patriot Act, which allowed the NSA to collect “metadata” from Americans’ cell phones without warrants.

The program, revealed by then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, was designed to help the NSA ferret out Americans who had contact with terror cells abroad, and collected basic information about millions of telephone calls made between Americans at home and abroad.

Snowden, of course, is now living in exile in Russia after revealing the metadata collection program, then known as PRISM, to journalists from The Guardian. Snowden had come into contact with information about the program while working for a string of defense contractors who either helped develop or administer the program.

At the time PRISM was revealed, the government contended that the metadata collection program did not require law enforcement to pursue individual warrants since the information gleaned from the program didn’t contain details of what was said in the calls themselves — just date, time, duration, and destination information. Several courts, over the years, have disagreed, chipping away at the program and the government’s self-given blanket permission to spy on American citizens, but only when the plaintiff has provided proof that they were the subject of a warrantless NSA wiretap. (Read more from “White House May Be Looking to Make NSA Wiretapping Permanent” HERE)

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