Putting brakes on the NSA sounds like good news, but this is an incredibly low bar to hurdle. After all, every other surveillance bill since the 1970s has radically expanded surveillance powers, and USA Freedom only curbs them in the most modest of ways.
But it’s also a significant moment. The people who care about digital
freedom have shown that they can defeat terrible legislation like SOPA
and PIPA, but for the first time, the public pressure for a more free
Internet has passed a bill that puts limits on the powers of the state to surveil Internet users. We’ve leveled up.
Now it’s time to press the fight. There’s plenty of other legal malware
floating around, providing legal cover for mass surveillance, and it all
needs to die in a fire: FISA 702 (which sunsets in 2017 unless it’s
renewed by Congress); Executive Order 12333, which the President can
eliminate at the stroke of a pen, and overclassification, which will
need new legislation to combat.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cindy Cohn and Mark Jaycox set out a roadmap for the fight ahead of us:
