Senator Dianne Feinstein finally responded to the Bay Area-wide Shame on Feinstein campaign. In her letter, the senator makes several questionable statements notably “The NSA does not conduct mass surveillance on US citizens”, that she “supports measures to improve oversight of US intelligence programs” and that she “take seriously my responsibility to ensure that national security programs honor the privacy and Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. citizens”. The letter is attached below.
The Bay Area coalition tells Senator Feinstein to quit derailing surveillance reform or resign from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
A group of Bay Area-based activist groups (The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the National Lawyers Guild, Media Alliance, Code Pink, Restore the Fourth, and the 99% Coalition) are celebrating Bill of Rights Day on December 15th by launching “Shame on Feinstein”, an open letter to the California senator objecting to her attempts to block meaningful reform to the abusive and unconstitutional acts of the National Security Admininstration (NSA).
Feinstein’s “FISA Improvement Acts” shamelessly attempts to retroactively legalize mass surveillance that has outraged the country and the world and to derail the basic reforms laid out in the “USA Freedom Act”, a bipartisan reform bill co-presented by Democrat Patrick Leahy and Republican James Sensenbrenner.
From her perch as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, CA’s senior senator has used her position as a road block to any sensible government action, despite national polls that Americans, citizens of the world and technology companies want and need these abuses to stop.