4 ms·

Eh... a federal appeals court ruled the Patriot Act illegal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/appeals-court-rules-nsa-phone-program-not-authorized-by-patriot-act-14

• schoen 11y ago
  That court decided that some of the surveillance that the government has been doing wasn't actually authorized by the Patriot Act. It didn't decide that no law could ever authorize that kind of surveillance. One challenge is that there is a great deal of other secret surveillance (beyond the collection of everyone's telephone calling records) that the government has also been doing under the Patriot Act. We still don't know what those programs are, but they may involve the collection of other complete databases about people's activity. Some of the efforts to extend this section of the Patriot Act might actually be inspired by those secret programs, without the proponents saying so (because the proponents don't want to talk about programs that haven't been disclosed). Congress has a lot of choices about how to respond to the court decision, particularly because it wasn't on constitutional grounds. In this case both the court decision and the expiry of section 215 mean that Congress could protect privacy against secret surveillance, including programs we don't even know about yet, quite a bit by simply doing nothing.