Fsia Where is Our Private Data?

Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act

To all Legislation Makers. This is not a decision of whither the President should have allowed all the wire tapping and breech of privacy he did. This is making law that works now and in the future.

You are looking at the present FSIA Law and deciding if it adequately protects the American Citizen as our Constitution provides.

I say the present law is useless. It does not even demand a need to know. This is truly a shotgun approach and many are wounded by the wide pattern.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

What a dangerous data base. We purchase items over the phone, give our personal information like credit card and Social Security numbers. This data is now stored on government computers with tens of thousands of people having access. Recently a Veterans data base was "accidentally" published on the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers and private information was released. All this information is simply making it easy for crooks to embezzle and scam people.

"Privacy no longer can mean anonymity," says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. "Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information."

It is unrealistic to think this information can be secured. People within the Intelligence agency itself have been convicted of embezzlement and selling secrets. The first rule in Military Security is the person must need to know. The government has no need to know my personal information. Security limits the numbers of people with such information. If a breech occurs it is than possible the individual can be confronted with their act. With tens of thousands of people accessing this "private" information it is impossible to secure. Hackers can go in, harvest the information and sell it.

We base our law on filing a complaint before a person can be charged with a crime. Here there are no complaints, no charges, no incriminating evidence at all.

The original Federal Surveillance Act provided that wire tapping and surveillance could begin immediately providing a Judge was given the information within 24 hours after the fact. That was a good law, it allowed "emergency" surveillance yet the judge could determine it's rightness and move it to be stricken or validated. We need that law back.

Please reinstate the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act of 1978. It is a good law.

I also would request those data bases be destroyed.

Thanks, Bruce

http://www.examiner.com/printa-1042151~Intel_Official:_Say_Goodbye_to_Privacy.html