The People's Representatives at Work

The campaign to rein in the surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA) has become even more difficult. Instead, Congress has used a set of provisions to expand the agency’s data-gathering power.

[...]

In a bill now headed for President Barack Obama’s desk, Congress gave the agency what civil liberties advocates argue is an unprecedented authority to collect and store data belonging to American citizens.

Additionally, the omnibus spending bill passed by the House on Thursday – intended to keep the government running through most of next year – was stripped of the amendment banning the NSA from conducting ‘backdoor’ surveillance on Americans and insisting that tech companies redesign their products to make them more surveillance-friendly.

[...]

The death of the Massie-Lofgren amendment would cap a bad year for legislative NSA reform. The USA Freedom Act, which would have ended the NSA's automatic dragnet collection of US phone records, passed the House in May after being weakened at the behest of hawkish members and the Obama administration, but then fell two votes short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster in the Senate.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.