US seeks immunity for surveillance firms
Iran Press TV
Sat May 3, 2014 9:52AM GMT
The US government is seeking to offer legal immunity for those telecommunications firms that provide costumers' data, a new report says.
In a private statement delivered some weeks ago to legislators, who are crafting competing reforms of the National Security Agency, the White House asked them to work to pass the required laws allowing the government to provide legal immunity for the firms, the Guardian reported.
The White House said it sought laws which can protect "any person who complies in good faith with an order to produce records" from legal liability for complying with court orders for phone records once the NSA no longer collects the data.
The request, which is part of a four-page document, is similar to a controversial provision of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act.
According to a provision of the act, the telecommunications companies, which allowed the NSA to access calls and call data between US citizens and foreigners, were provided retroactive immunity.
A senior US administration official described the provision as typical for surveillance law that aims to protect firms that comply with Fisa court orders for customer data.
"This would refer to any new orders issued by the court under the new regime we are proposing. This is similar to the way the rest of Fisa already operates, and Fisa already contains virtually identical language for its other provisions, including Section 215," the official stated.
A congressional aide said such companies were anticipated to "fight hard" for the provision in order to survive in any other surveillance bill.
Firms, including Verizon and AT&T, have remained more silent in public about NSA's massive data collection than other companies, like Yahoo and Google.
NSA has been under the spotlight for some months after Edward Snowden, a contractor, leaked documents showing massive surveillance activities by the agency including eavesdropping on millions of phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
AT/AGB
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