EFF: Sen. Feinstein Supports “Backdoor” Warrants, So Why Don’t Reps. Nunes and Schiff?
Sen. Feinstein Supports “Backdoor” Warrants, So Why Don’t Reps. Nunes and Schiff? As the deadline for renewing and reforming key portions of the NSA’s spying apparatus looms less than two months away, two of the most important members of the House Intelligence Committee have stayed remarkably quiet in the conversation. Congress just introduced multiple bills to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act , a law that authorizes controversial NSA surveillance programs and is set to expire at the end of this year. Some of the bills include various ways to fix what is called the “backdoor search” loophole. Currently, the NSA “incidentally” collects the communications of countless Americans and stores those communications in vast databases. The FBI routinely searches through these databases for information about U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. The FBI does not obtain any probable cause warrants for these searches, skirting Fourth Amendment protections...