ALL Americans who are concerned with the US Government’s total disregard for their privacy need to contact your senator and tell them that if they vote in favor of taking away our privacy without a court order, than their jobs are in danger, and that we will work to vote ANYONE who votes for this corrupt amendment out of office in the next election.
You may use this link to find contact details for your senator.
http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
Many weak and corrupt Republicans joined with the corrupt anti-American Democrats to try and steal your privacy, and give the FBI complete access to ALL American’s browser history, without suspicion, and without a court order.
And the scary thing is that the amendment only lost by one vote – and that vote was actually changed from a “Yes” to a “No” by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to defeat the amendment at the very last minute.
The government doesn’t want you or me to have our own rights that limit what the government can do. The US government wants to control every aspect of your life, including everything you do and say, and to do that they must take away our constitutionally given rights.
These criminally-corrupt politicians will not stop trying to take away the rights of Americans until the government controls every aspect of our lives, and nobody has any rights.
Contact your senator now and tell them that we are watching their votes, and anyone who is against using court orders to invade American privacy do not deserve to hold their position in congress.
Here is a link where you can get the contact information for your Senator.
http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
Privacy-minded senators on Wednesday blocked an amendment that would give the FBI power to take internet records, including browser histories and email metadata, without a court order. But the victory may be fleeting.
Just one vote kept the measure from clearing a 60-vote procedural hurdle, and political arm-twisting may soon result in a second vote. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., switched his vote to “no” to allow reconsideration in the near future. That made the final tally 58-38, with four senators not voting.
Critics of the propsed expasion of the FBI’s ability to demand records with national security letters, or NSLs, are urging opponents to flood their senators with calls. There were some unexpected “yes” votes, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who they hope to flip as some of the four senators who did not vote are viewed as tougher sells.
“It’s obviously a good thing that this didn’t move forward in the Senate,” says Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “This would be an expansion of the Patriot Act and a very substantial one that would allow the FBI to get what many people consider their most sensitive information.”
“It’s important that the public contact their senators and say, ‘We don’t want this expansion of the Patriot Act,'” she says. “There were a lot of members who voted in favor who you wouldn’t expect. This is a situation where you could see a lot of pressure on members to change their votes, which is why it’s important the public understands the stakes here.”
The amendment would allow the FBI to use national security letters to force companies to turn over “electronic communications transactional records,” sometimes referred to as an ECTR, when it claims they are relevant to an investigation into terrorism or espionage. NSLs are administrative subpoenas that don’t require court approval and often come with a gag order.
Critics say the FBI already can get ECTR records if it convinces a judge there’s good cause or if there’s an emergency and it seeks retroactive court review.
“When most people hear ECTR, they go, ‘What’s an ECTR?’ And of course they do,” says Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the Open Technology Institute. “ECTRs are not records that people are familiar with. When you send an email or go to a website, you think about the content you are sending or receiving, not that there’s a trail you are leaving that if the government accessed would reveal your entire digital fingerprint.”
Greene, who opposes the amendment, says “the expectation is they were beat, but they may try again.”
The surveillance-enhancing amendment is part of a third attempt to get the NSL expansion through the Senate. A first attempt successfully attached it to the annual intelligence authorization bill, with the Senate intelligence committee approving it behind closed doors with a lone “no” vote from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. The underlying bill hasn’t been considered by the full Senate. A second attempt killed a bill that would have required warrants for U.S. emails when there were enough votes to attach the measure in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On Tuesday, a prominent supporter of the legislation, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said the bill could have helped the FBI apprehend Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen, who the agency had twice investigated years before he killed 49 people at a gay nightclub on June 12 in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Cornyn said it might have showed Mateen’s email contacts and that he was watching sermons posted to YouTube by radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
Wyden argued on the Senate floor Wednesday that the amendment violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections and that it’s unnecessary because the surveillance-reforming USA Freedom Act enacted last year “allows the FBI to demand all of these records in an emergency and then go get court approval after the fact. So unless you’re opposed to court oversight, even after the fact, there’s no need to support this amendment.”
Read more here http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/senate-falls-1-vote-short-of-giving-fbi-access-to-browser-histories-without-court-order
Stand Up To Government Corruption and Hypocrisy – usbacklash.org