House unexpectedly votes to stop warrantless NSA searches

Well, I am not sure if we can chalk this up as victory just yet!
But it will definitely be interesting to see what happens to from here on out!

By a vote of 293 to 123, a bipartisan coalition in the House voted to ban the National Security Agency from conducting “backdoor searches” on United States citizens, a process that allowed the intelligence community to collect data on Americans without a warrant as long as the official target was a foreigner. The program was first revealed by the Guardian, through documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

The NSA has argued that when a US citizen engages in communication with a foreigner it has targeted for surveillance, the spy agency can legitimately store the data – email, phone, and text conversations – in a database and search through it at any time for information on US citizens. The House vote comes amid rising concerns over the potential for the NSA to continue expanding its collection of data on Americans.

rt.com...
Its also obvious to me that we have some " movers & shakers " who are against this amendment. I'll definitely be taking note of that for future voting prospect.

What say you ATS ?

a reply to: LightningStrikesHere

I love this. I hope it goes somewhere, but with idiots like Pelosi and McCain in the senate you never know.

I am less afraid of terrorists than I am my own Government and the NSA.

all this means is one extra transatlantic phone call to the UK and have a word with someone from GCHQ and they'll do all the dirty work quite legally and then send you the data collected to read at their leisure

They have rules, and discard or exempt themselves in one facet or another for 99% of it.

time will tell....and whislteblowers.

I think it's a smokescreen.

They're playing good cop/bad cop with us. We've been led to believe that every phone and computer in the world is tapped by the NSA illegally. People who believe that will be very pleased to learn that the government is looking out for their privacy. So... happy people.

But the NSA doesn't have every phone and computer in the world tapped, and they don't care to. The level of alarm over the issue greatly exceeds the reality of the situation. The level of alarm is the goal, not the tapping of phones.

They just say the nsa is not allowed. They said nothing about the fbi and cia and whoever else is not allowed too.

Well they lied they were even doingit before they were exposed. I suppose I'll believe them now, though.

Keeps hand in cookie jar, "I promise never to do it again".

How would we know anyway? They are monitoring, not kicking down doors.

So where do you find who those 123 that voted against it are? I'd like to peruse that list.

originally posted by: Metallicus
I love this. I hope it goes somewhere, but with idiots like Pelosi and McCain in the senate you never know.
I am less afraid of terrorists than I am my own Government and the NSA.

I'm going to assume you meant Reid because Pelosi is in the house. Information on the vote can be found here. The party breakdown is 138 R + 158 D FOR the amendment and 94 R + 29 D AGAINST.

Pelosi voted for the amendment.

I'm with Metallicus in being less afraid of terrorists than our governments.

It doesn't make sense that foreigners are not protected by the US Constitution, while in the US. Wouldn't that mean a citizen of Canada working legally and in the wrong place at the wrong time could be detained and questioned without protection of the law?

How on earth there is even still a tourism industry in the U.S.A is beyond me.

No. What they're doing is just trying to make the attention go away. It's election time. It's not good PR for anyone (both parties have had their hands in this). They can certainly afford to let this go away for awhile. At least until the elections are over and the public has forgotten all about it. We all know the general public has the attention span of a gnat.

They can dust it off and quietly resume whatever they're doing when people stop paying attention again. That won't take long.

a reply to: LightningStrikesHere

Great news. It's so rare to see encroaching surveillance being rolled back. A large part of this will be thanks to Snowden as neither side of the House would have known how far the agency had gone before the leaks.

Nobody really knew when they were doing it so how will anyone really know when they aren't??

They can say whatever they want, if they don't provide a list of definitions of the words they are using there is no way to know what they are actually saying.......

Really, no kidding....

Ignorance is no excuse, even if you are not provided with the definitions list and it is purposefully kept from you.

Really.