FISA 101: 10 key dates in the evolution of NSA surveillance

4. Patriot Act renewed, 2006

In December 2005, the New York Times exposed an NSA eavesdropping program, authorized by President Bush, which allowed for warrantless surveillance of US citizens inside the United States.

Mr. Bush defended the program, saying that it was in the interest of national security. Despite the public outcry that the expose of this program created, Bush singed a renewal of the Patriot Act on March 26, 2006.

Shortly after the renewal, USA Today reported that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone records of “tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.” The White House defended the collection, saying that Congress had been briefed on court proceedings.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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