Brandon Turbeville on Red Line - June 4, 2015

Brandon Turbeville.com
June 6, 2015

Brandon's appearance on Red Line - June 4, 2015

Edward Snowden: The Man Who Made Obama to Retreat

Red Line

Sputnik 

June 4, 2015

The US Congress endorsed National Security Agency reform in an historic vote for the US Freedom Act, seen by some as a major win for the exiled whistleblower.

The so-called Freedom Act is the successor to the Patriot Act’s specific provisions on domestic surveillance, and the main change it brings is that telecommunications providers, not the government, will store customers’ data instead. Critics have decried the Freedom Act as not doing enough to abide by the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees Americans freedom from unlawful searches and seizures. Snowden himself commemorated it for being a step in the right direction, but expressed dissatisfaction that it didn’t go far enough in protecting Americans’ privacy.

Seen by some as a controversial and divisive figure, Snowden, nevertheless, was the one who made the world aware of the NSA’s controversial domestic spying programs, and the Freedom Act wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for his courageous whistleblowing.

Boris Volkhonsky, Head of the Asian Desk, Russian Institute for Strategic Studies(studio guest), Brandon Turbeville, American journalist and geopolitical analyst and Raymond McGovern, Former CIA analyst, commented on the issue.

FREEDOM Act Passes, Effectively Kills Freedom

Anthony Freda Art

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
June 3, 2015

With the passage of the USA FREEDOM Act, mainstream media outlets and even some “privacy advocates” are hailing the passage of the bill as a welcome step forward and a sign of defeat for the USA PATRIOT Act, the bill that was itself passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and widely representative of the United States’ rapid descent into outright police state tyranny.

Unfortunately, however, the passage of the FREEDOM Act is no victory for freedom. In fact, is an insultingly sound nail in freedom’s coffin.

The bill, which has been promoted and supported by many of the same members of Congress that supported the PATRIOT Act (notably, James Sensenbrenner) now comes on the heels of a 2nd US Circuit Court decision that bulk telecommunications data collection was not authorized by the PATRIOT Act, unconstitutional, and therefore an illegal act.

To be sure, the FREEDOM Act has been in the works for passage since 2013 when lawmakers began pushing it. At the time, the bill attempted to actually extend the PATRIOT Act provisions through the end of 2017 as well as maintain a number of violations of civil liberties and privacy concerns.

The new version of the FREEDOM Act is no better, except perhaps in the language being used to promote it.