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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 02 2016, @12:40PM
I made this same point all through the Bush and Obama administrations. You might be OK handing police state powers over to "your" guy, but what happens when those powers transfer to the "wrong" guy?
I'm certain none of these powers should ever have been granted in a country that likes to think of itself as free, and I'm pretty certain we would have found ourselves regretting their having transferred to either of the two major candidates this time when a couple years have elapsed.
Washington DC delenda est.