WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Leandra Bernstein — The US government will likely continue its pattern of domestic surveillance following the Monday court ruling to temporarily extend bulk data collection, whistleblower and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Coleen Rowley told Sputnik.
“I think, if the past is any predictor of the future, that US government officials will find yet another way around any legal restrictions to continue their ‘Total Information Awareness’ project,” Rowley said.
On Monday, the Foreign Information Surveillance Act (FISA) Court issued a ruling upholding the National Security Agency (NSA) to continue bulk collection of metadata, a program that was supposed to be ended with the passage of the USA Freedom Act in May 2015.
The ruling was based on a motion filed by civil libertarian groups demanding an immediate end to the metadata collection program, which was deemed unconstitutional by a US federal appeals court in May 2015.
Asked what the Monday ruling means for the future of government surveillance reform, Rowley stated, “I think the Judge [Michael Mosman] probably answered this in his ‘Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose’ [the more things change, the more they stay the same] quote.”
The FISA Court authorizes surveillance carried out by the US intelligence community. The Court is permitted to operate in secret, due to the classified activity it oversees.
Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration proposed the implementation of a massive data-mining program called the Total Information Awareness.
The program was developed by the Department of Defense research agency to be capable of analyzing private communications, commercial transactions and other data domestically and abroad in order to identify and classify potential terrorist threats.
While the program was never officially implemented, multiple programs across the intelligence community accomplished a similar effect, as was revealed in classified documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
