Over at The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy website, Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Director Cindy Cohn writes about the so-called Presidential Surveillance Program, the “still-shadowy set of programs that spy on Americans in America without any probable cause or warrant.” The EFF, as regular BB readers know, has fought this program for several years now — in 2006, it filed suit against AT&T for providing the NSA with direct access to its database of communications records. Snip from Cohn’s essay:
While the details are unknown, credible evidence indicates that billions of everyday communications of ordinary Americans are swept up by government computers and run through a process that includes both data-mining and review of content, to try to figure out whether any of us were involved in illegal or terrorist-related activity. That means that even the most personal and private of our electronic communications – between doctors and patients, between husbands and wives, or between children and parents – are subject to review by computer algorithms programmed by government bureaucrats or by the bureaucrats themselves.
(Read more from boingboing.net)
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