|
 |
How Much
Does The Gov't Know
About
Your Private Life?
by AP
from the Web, November 11, 2007
|
| |
|
Washington -- A top
intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their
definition of privacy.
Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of
national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and
businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial
information.
Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign
Surveillance Intelligence Act.
Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to
eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end
of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.
The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S.
soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law
was obstructing intelligence gathering.
The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield
telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the
government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court
order between 2001 and 2007.
Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear
reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how
far the government has burrowed into people's privacy without court permission.
The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill
will protect telecommunications companies.
The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is
vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T
switching station in San Francisco.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he
says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and
Internet site access on AT&T lines.
|
