Tag: NSA surveillance powers

NOVANEWS By Rainey Reitman Congress is poised to vote on extending or reforming NSA surveillance powers in the coming weeks, and one issue has risen to the forefront of the fight: backdoor searches. These are searches in which FBI, CIA, and NSA agents search through the communications of Americans collected by the NSA without a warrant. This practice violates the Fourth Amendment. But the government argues that since the NSA originally collected the communications under statutory surveillance powers, the government doesn't need a warrant to search through them later. This is a "backdoor" around the Constitutional rights that protect our digital communications. But we have a chance to shut and lock that backdoor, so that government agents don't access the communications of Americans ...