Deep State just in case
by digby
And here I thought the Trumpies were our new champions of civil liberties:
The Trump administration has broken its long silence on a high-profile National Security Agency programme that sifts records of Americans’ telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists on Thursday.
They acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down — but asked congress to extend its legal basis anyway.
In a letter to congress delivered on Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, the administration urged lawmakers to make the USA Freedom Act permanent, being the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans’ domestic communications.
The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward Snowdenrevealed the existence of the programme in 2013, is set to expire in December, but the Trump administration wants it made lasting.
The unclassified letter, signed by Dan Coats on Wednesday in one of his last acts as the director of National Intelligence, also conceded that the NSA has indefinitely shut down that programme after recurring technical difficulties repeatedly caused it to collect more records than it had legal authority to gather.
Well ok then.
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