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

8. Four-year extension to Patriot Act, 2011

Evan Vucci/ AP Photo/ File
President Barack Obama gestures during a statement in San Jose, Calif in June 2013. The president signed a renewal to the Patriot Act in 2011.

On May 26, 2011, President Obama authorized a four-year extension of the Patriot Act while in France using a mechanical signature. This keeps all of the previous amendments to FISA in place and allows government surveillance programs to continue.

In the same year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon and Sen. Mark Udall (D) of Colorado, both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were concerned by certain government surveillance techniques and provided the public with vague warnings about certain data collection methods.

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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.”

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