Domestic spying to increase under Donald Trump

  When the Presidential election cycle first kicked off about two years ago I honestly believed that domestic spying would be a factor in the election. I thought this might actually be an issue with young people who were upset with the internet, especially social media, tracking however it turned out not to be the case when the two parties each nominated supporters of domestic spying.

  If you were not happy with Barack Obama’s domestic spying programs (some of which were eventually scaled back) you are not going to be happy with this report–I know I am not!

  Here is more:

The FBI, National Security Agency and CIA are likely to gain expanded surveillance powers under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, a prospect that has privacy advocates and some lawmakers trying to mobilize opposition.

Trump’s first two choices to head law enforcement and intelligence agencies — Republican Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general and Republican Representative Mike Pompeo for director of the Central Intelligence Agency — are leading advocates for domestic government spying at levels not seen since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

An “already over-powerful surveillance state” is about to “be let loose on the American people,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress, an internet and privacy advocacy organization.

  And here is more:

In a reversal of curbs imposed after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about mass data-gathering by the NSA, Trump and Congress may move to reinstate the collection of bulk telephone records, renew powers to collect the content of e-mails and other internet activity, ease restrictions on hacking into computers and let the FBI keep preliminary investigations open longer.

“Under the proposed rules, the government would now be able to obtain a single warrant to access and search thousands or millions of computers at once; and the vast majority of the affected computers would belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

  That is only the beginning, there is much more which you can read about in the above-linked article. This is the biggest reason why I did not support or vote for Donald Trump. Remember the outcry when we learned about the metadata collection program under Barack Obama, if Donald Trump has his way the program is coming back on steroids.

  People who defend metadata collection and a single warrant to access millions of computers claim that if you are not doing anything wrong you should not be worried about this but I would argue you should be worried because this is a violation of the Fourth Amendment which states all people are to be free from unreasonable searches and that a person must be named in the warrant only after probable cause has been found. We are giving up essential liberty for a little perceived security and I think you all know what Benjamin Franklin had to say about that…

  My post signature has never been more fitting:

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium