Surveillance expansion threatens press freedom – and everyone else's

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Mass surveillance is widespread. Congress must rein in government spying powers.
In 2013, whistleblower and longtime Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) board member Edward Snowden’s stunning revelations of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency shocked the world. Since then, we’ve learned even more about the alarming scope of surveillance by the U.S. government.
Mass surveillance undermines everyone’s privacy, and it threatens press freedom by allowing the government to spy on communications between journalists and their sources.
Tell Congress to Fix Section 702 of FISA.
Call or email your senator or representative and urge them to fix Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A recent change to the law has vastly expanded the government’s spying powers.
Help advance press freedom by writing newspaper op-eds or letters to the editor in support of fixing Section 702 of FISA.
After public backlash led to a major defeat in 2020, lawmakers are now attempting to rush the anti-privacy legislation through the Senate.
Journalists have been working incredibly hard to expose the spyware company and its authoritarian users. But let's not forget about the whistleblowers.
Stop us if you've heard this one before: the NSA failed to follow procedural and policy requirements surrounding the use of surveillance data collected on U.S. persons, according to a new report from the group's Office of the Inspector General.
Sen. Ron Wyden calls the Justice Department’s inaction on key press freedom issue “extremely frustrating, and frankly unacceptable”
New reporting into a government operation codenamed "Operation Whistle Pig" describes a shocking level of invasion into the personal and private lives of journalists. In blockbuster reporting, Yahoo News describes the actions of the Counter Network Division, a secretive unit of U.S. Customs and Border Protection that works with law enforcement and the intelligence community.
The FBI raid of James O'Keefe is a troubling development for press freedom. That the potential story was not a blockbuster public interest investigation, and that O’Keefe and Project Veritas have a long history of deception and manipulation, do not change that fact.
A shocking investigation by Yahoo News shows the CIA contemplated kidnapping and assassination against the Wikileaks publisher.
Apple announced Friday that it would postpone its planned roll-out of user device surveillance technology that had come under heavy fire from the privacy and civil liberties community. It should drop the plans entirely.
The backlash from privacy and human rights advocates to Apple's new plan this month for scanning photos on user devices to detect known child sexual abuse images has been loud and nearly unanimous. The tech raises press freedom problems, too.
New rules prohibiting the surveillance of journalists are the strongest in the modern history of the Department of Justice — and that’s a big victory for press freedom. But it’s important to note that this new policy could be undone by a future Department of Justice memo.