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Republicans call for halt to “unconstitutional surveillance programs”

New GOP resolution says NSA metadata dragnet program harms basic human rights.

Republicans call for halt to “unconstitutional surveillance programs”

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has passed a resolution that “encourages Republican lawmakers to immediately take action to halt current unconstitutional surveillance programs and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s data collection programs.”

The resolution, according to Time, was approved by an overwhelming majority voice vote at the Republican National Committee’s Winter Meeting General Session, going on this week in Washington, DC.

The Republican statement comes just one day after the White House said it disagreed with the findings of a Congress-approved watchdog group that also called for the shutdown of the NSA telephone metadata program.

The RNC, which did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, is refining its political platform as it gears up for the 2014 Congressional elections this November and the 2016 presidential race.

The resolution also states that “unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society and this program represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy and goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act.”

However, the document seems to conflate the PRISM surveillance program with the ongoing metadata dragnet that has been validated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Its opening paragraph states:

Whereas, the secret surveillance program called PRISM targets, among other things, the surveillance of U.S. citizens on a vast scale and monitors searching habits of virtually every American on the internet; whereas this dragnet program is, as far as we know, the largest surveillance effort ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens, consisting of the mass acquisition of Americans’ call details encompassing all wireless and landline subscribers of the country’s three largest phone companies.

In fact, PRISM is the title of an intelligence program through which the National Security Agency accesses user data handed over from major tech companies collected under legal authorities such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FISA AA) Section 702 and Executive Order 12333.

The RNC appears to also have ignored the fact that much of the NSA’s surveillance capability that is now being roundly criticized in the wake of the Snowden leaks first began under President George W. Bush, a Republican. Further, elements of the program were approved by a Republican-majority Congress, such as the FISA AA, which passed both houses of Congress in 2008 and was signed by Bush.

Channel Ars Technica