USA Freedom Act Proposed to Curb Bulk Data Collection

it's been a terrible month, but it's not all bad news! american senator patrick leahy just slapped a bill down that if passed would put the brakes on bulk metadata collection.



(but pretty much only for americans.)



hey, it's a damn good start.

The bill, which has White House backing, goes further than a version passed in May by the U.S. House of Representatives in reducing bulk collection and may be more acceptable to critics who have dismissed other versions as too weak...

The bill, called the USA Freedom Act, would prohibit the government from collecting all information from a particular service provider or a broad geographic area, such as a city or area code, according to a release from Leahy's office...

The Senate bill would end the bulk collection authorized by Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which was enacted during the George W. Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

It instead would authorize searches for telephone call records "two hops" from a search term, with a hop indicating connections between people suspected of links to foreign terrorism.

and here's the bill itself.

let's keep our fingers crossed and hope this passes.

a reply to: ATODASO

That's a long one, I'll have to read through it before I can make too much of a comment but an end to domestic bulk data collection would be a definite win. Looks like there are a couple of GOP cosponsors (Ted Cruz, Mike Lee) too.