USA Freedom Act will continue warrantless wiretapping by NSA: Journalist

A new US law passed by Congress on Tuesday to reform widespread spying programs by the National Security Agency (NSA) will do very little to change the overall surveillance situation in the United States, an American investigative journalist says.

“The USA Freedom Act will continue this policy of warrantless wiretapping by the NSA,” said Wayne Madsen, who is also an author specializing in international affairs.

“The people who say that the USA Freedom Act will constrain the NSA within legal bounds… they’re living in a dream world, they know that they want to maintain NSA surveillance authorities,” Madsen said during a phone interview with Press TV on Friday.

“The only way to deal with NSA is not to mend it, is to end it, get rid of it, get rid of the NSA and get rid of the CIA; we have too many intelligence agencies that tear up the US Constitution on a daily basis,” he added.

US President Barack Obama signed the USA Freedom Act into law on Tuesday, hours after the Senate gave its final approval for the legislation. The bill passed the US House of Representatives on May 13, 2015.

The new law will replace the Patriot Act, the sweeping surveillance legislation passed in the days immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The law eliminates the NSA’s bulk phone-records collection program and replaces it with a program that keeps the records with phone companies but allows the government to search them with a court warrant.

The legislation will phase out the once secret NSA phone spying program over a six months period. The program was made public two years ago by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.

However, the legislation would continue other post-9/11 surveillance provisions, including the FBI's authority to gather business records in terrorism and espionage investigations and to more easily eavesdrop on suspects who regularly discard mobile phones to avoid surveillance.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy advocates have warned that the bill does little to ensure privacy.  

“No one should mistake this bill for comprehensive reform. The bill leaves many of the government’s most intrusive and overbroad surveillance powers untouched, and it makes only very modest adjustments to disclosure and transparency requirements,” said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director.

Madsen said the Obama administration has used the false threat of terrorists and hackers to continue NSA surveillance programs.

“Of course the NSA is going to use the excuse that they’re looking for hackers, when in fact it’s very clear from looking at the documents revealed by Edward Snowden that the NSA has nothing more than a surveillance agenda, total surveillance of every means of communication, every computer, every electronic transaction,” he stated.

Snowden, who lives in Russia where he has been granted asylum, has said that US government surveillance methods far surpass those of an ‘Orwellian’ state, referring to George Orwell’s classic novel “1984,” which describes a society where personal privacy is continuously invaded by spy agencies.

AHT/GJH

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