The US surveillance state is poised to grow more powerful under a Trump administration.
Though President-elect Donald Trump still has nearly two months until he's sworn in, his picks for Attorney General and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency are a sign that many surveillance reforms could be overturned or changed, such as the NSA's collection of telephone metadata on all Americans — a program that was reformed after it was exposed by Edward Snowden.
Trump recently appointed Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, and Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo for CIA Director. Both have advocated for the increased domestic spying that was implemented by former President George W. Bush after 9/11, according to Bloomberg.
"Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database," Pompeo wrote with coauthor David Rivkin, Jr. in a Wall Street Journal editorial in January.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday December 02 2016, @03:14AM
Let's talk about third-order effects - implied understanding that the sweeping domestic powers are to be used against Islamic and other Brown Anti-Americans rather than Joe Whiteboy in Northern California in possession of 2 30-round magazines bitching about taxes but otherwise paying them and holding a steady job.
Implied understanding is worthless. This sort of power will be turned on whoever is deemed a target, be it "brown anti-Americans", "Joe Whiteboy" or anyone else that authorities deem inconvenient. That's the thing about politics. No faction ever really stays out of politics forever. What powers we give government will eventually be used by factions that are at odds with us.