Mozilla, EFF and 84 more companies and organizations united against NSA spying

A coalition of Internet companies and public organizations signed an open letter to the Obama administration calling for an audit of the powers that the American special services have in terms of mass surveillance of civilians.

Open letter signatories call on Congress to create a commission like the Church Commission , formed after the Watergate scandal in the 70s to study the intelligence operations of the FBI and the CIA. Its purpose is to check whether intelligence officers use only legal methods, whether they do not exceed their authority, hiding crimes behind the secrecy bar.

Another goal of the open letter is to stimulate reforms in the field of legislative protection of the rights and freedoms of citizens, guaranteed protection of the privacy of users.

Congress is required to immediately stop the surveillance program for the population and provide a full public report on the mechanisms for collecting data from the NSA and the FBI. In addition, the Congress should immediately and publicly:
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1. Initiate reforms in section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and in the FISA Amendments Act, to clearly and formulate a strict ban on collecting data on Internet activity and telephone conversations of any US resident, and violations of this ban will be prosecuted.
2. Create a special committee to investigate, report and disclose to the public the degree of espionage in the United States. The committee should put forward specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform, which will effectively prevent unconstitutional surveillance of citizens in the future.
3. To bring to justice the officials who are guilty of organizing unconstitutional surveillance of the population.

An open letter was signed by such well-known companies and organizations as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Free Software Foundation (Mozilla, Reddit, 4Chan, Internet Archive, DuckDuckGo, Greenpeace, and American Civil Liberties Union). ACLU). By the way, the ACLU with 500 thousand registered members is considered a very authoritative organization, and its participation has already helped to make some changes in the constitutional law of the United States.

The full text of the letter is available on the Stopwatching.us campaign website. This is a global petition, which can be signed by any citizen of the Internet.

“It's time for Congress to act. We are not satisfied with a small amendment to the PATRIOT Act, we need a complete public report on how the United States uses sophisticated spyware technology to spy on its own citizens, we demand accountability from officials and a complete revision of the law to ensure that this will not happen again never, ” says Mark Rumold, one of the staff lawyers of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

He is echoed by Alex Fowler, the head of Mozilla for privacy and politics: “Mozilla believes in the Internet, in which we don’t need to fear that our every action is tracked, recorded and recorded by companies or governments. And we believe in a state whose actions are open, transparent and accountable.