14 DAY TRIAL // A group of eight US Senators have now proposed a bill to declassify the secret court decisions that made it possible for the US government to spy on millions of Americans without their knowledge.
When information about the massive scale of the NSA surveillance program got leaked last week, the US administration tried to defend it by saying it was all legal.
The sad part is that it's true. Under the Patriot Act, the government can ask a special court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to order companies to hand out all the info they need.
The decisions and the reasoning of the court are secret, so the public has no way of knowing whether the court is doing what it's supposed to, namely protect its interests.
"Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the law," Senator Jeff Merkley, the author of the bill, said in a statement.
The new bill asks that the reasoning behind the decisions made by the court be made public so that everyone can be informed about what the US government and the court believes is fair game.
The court has been issuing orders on a recurring basis, which allow the NSA to request the phone records of all Americans from all telecommunication companies. The orders get renewed every three months. But until one such order got leaked, the public couldn't have known about their existence.
This comes just after a coalition of 86 civil liberties groups published an open letter to the US Congress to amend the dangerous laws that have given the NSA such powers.
Obviously, the issue is the hot topic of the moment. Senator Merkley is hoping to use this attention to get the bill passed. This isn't the first time he proposes such a bill, but it is the first time it has a chance of becoming law.