USA FREEDOM may bring bulk collection back from the dead

Not even George Orwell could make this stuff up…..

Next time someone tries to tell you that the USA FREEDOM Act somehow protects our liberty, remind them that bill is actuality being used by the Obama Administration to justify resuming bulk data collection.

From The Guardian:

The Obama administration intends to use part of a law banning the bulk collection of US phone records to temporarily restart the bulk collection of US phone records.

US officials confirmed to the Guardian that in the coming days they will ask a secret surveillance court to revive the program – deemed illegal by a federal appeals court – all in the name of “transitioning” the domestic surveillance effort to the telephone companies that generate the so-called “call detail records” the government seeks to access.

The unconventional and unexpected legal circumstance depends on a section of the USA Freedom Act, which Obama signed into law on Tuesday, that provides a six-month grace period to prepare the surveillance and legal bureaucracies for a world in which the National Security Agency is no longer the repository of bulk US phone metadata.

During that time, the act’s ban on bulk collection will not yet take effect.

Keep in mind that the USA FREEDOM Act does not really ban bulk collection, it simply outsources it to the phone companies.

Only in DC, where “eduction in the rate of growth” is considered a “spending cut,” could outsourcing bulk data collection be confused for  “ending bulk data collection.”