Why you should care about phone record surveillance:
It violates the privacy of millions of innocent people. The NSA and FBI use Section 215 to collect the phone records of millions of people who have never even been suspected or accused of a crime.
It’s unconstitutional and illegal. Section 215 of the Patriot Act was re-interpreted in complete secrecy to allow the surveillance of everyone without suspicion. One federal judge who ruled on the program’s legality after it was revealed to the public called it “beyond Orwellian” and “likely unconstitutional.”
It doesn’t make us any safer. The NSA has defended the phone metadata program by saying it has stopped terrorist attacks, but that claim has been repeatedly proven false. Even the White House’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has said, “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which [bulk collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act] made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”
For years, the United States government has been collecting every record of every phone call you make — when you call, whom you call, how long the call lasted, and how often you make those calls. This surveillance program affects hundreds of millions of regular people who have never done anything wrong, and it doesn’t matter if you’re calling your next-door neighbor or a family member halfway around the world.
But there’s good news: this mass surveillance program could end in the next few weeks.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act is set to expire on June 1, 2015. The Patriot Act and the reauthorizations that followed had myriad bad provisions. But it’s Section 215 of the original Patriot Act that the NSA re-interpreted in complete secrecy to allow them, with the help of the FBI, to collect millions of phone call records per day. The government could even try to use Section 215 for bulk collection of financial or other business records. With your help, we can stop Congress from simply rubber-stamping Patriot Act Section 215 — and stop this mass suspicionless surveillance program once and for all.
Use our phone tool to call Congress today. Tell Congress: Your time is up. Vote to end NSA mass surveillance. Then ask your friends to do the same.