WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The major American telecommunications companies will continue to cooperate eagerly with the US government and carry out its wishes just as during the past 14 years, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Executive Director Cindy Cohn stated.
“[Verizon and AT&T] have demonstrated that they are willing to cooperate with the US government” in the mass surveillance programs of the National Security Agency (NSA), Cohn said on Monday.
Cohn was speaking just hours after Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act had run out at midnight on Sunday, which the government used as justification for its mass surveillance programs.
The US phone and Internet providing corporations “do not have an obligation… to serve as an intelligence arm of the government,” the EFF Director said.
“Most of these companies keep this information [the records of all phone and electronic communications within the United States] for at least 18 months,” she added.
Cohn also said that the American public is kept in the dark about their rights to privacy and protection from surveillance because the US government refuses to inform them.
“The government is not telling you what whether you have legal rights or not. That is outrageous,” Cohn said on Monday. “Americans shouldn’t have to read tea leaves to figure out what their rights are.”
On Monday, the Senate was considering passage of the replacement 2015 USA Freedom Act, which restores electronic communications surveillance authority to the US government in a different and more limited form.
Under the new legislation, phone companies will retain records of all communications for 18 months, and the government can specifically request portions of the records.
However, Cohn said, the US government at no point had publicly and specifically stated what the privacy rights its citizens were with regard to mass security surveillance.
“The government has not come out and said authoritatively what it thinks it can and cannot do,” she said. “We don’t know anything.”
Cohn explained there still is a “huge veil of secrecy.” The US government still had to “reform the culture of secrecy,” she added.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a US nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital arena, according to the organization’s web site.
