TWO SENATORS URGE OBAMA TO END BULK DATA COLLECTION

Washington, 1 Jumadil Akhir 1435/2 April 2014 (MINA) – Two Democratic senators have urged US President Barack Obama to end bulk data collection which they say are unwarranted and illegal, Press TV quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting, Wednesday.

In an email statement on Tuesday, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall said the government’s spying effort is “unacceptable” and proves the existence of a loophole in surveillance law that allows the National Security Agency to illegally search the Internet communications and listen to the phone calls of Americans who may have no connection to terrorism.

“It raises serious constitutional questions and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans,” the senators said. “Senior officials have sometimes suggested that government agencies do not deliberately read Americans’ emails, monitor their online activity or listen to their phone calls without a warrant. However, the facts show that those suggestions were misleading.”

“It is now clear to the public that the list of ongoing intrusive surveillance practices by the NSA includes not only bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, but also warrantless searches of the content of Americans’ personal communications,” Wyden and Udall said.

In an interview on Sunday, Wyden had urged Obama to take an immediate action to halt the spying effort.

“I believe the president ought to make the transition right away,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press. “I believe strongly we ought to ban all dragnet surveillance on law-abiding Americans, not just phone records but also medical records, purchases and others.”

The member of the Senate intelligence committee said the president should not wait for Congress to pass legislation.

Obama already proposed a plan that would allow the government to obtain telephone records only if it got individual orders for individual numbers from the foreign intelligence surveillance court, also known as the Fisa court. (T/E01/IR)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)