Joseph Stalin would have loved the broad surveillance powers Congress handed President Joe Biden on Friday with the passage of a bill to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after the defeat of an amendment to rein in government overreach with a warrant requirement, according to a conservative history expert at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
According to Austin Prochko, the Project Manager at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and author of “Foundations of Freedom: The Layman’s Guide to the Philosophy of the American Founding,” Stalin would have loved to get his hands on the power that Congress just handed Biden under the leadership of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).
BREAKING IN WASHINGTON: The House has voted 273-147 to extend FISA Section 702 warrantless surveillance authority until 2026, surpassing the April 19 deadline. Americans will now be spied on without the need for a warrant, thanks to a push by Speaker Mike Johnson and White House pic.twitter.com/OBcb6U5yYU
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) April 12, 2024
Stalin — the notoriously brutal leader of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953 during a period of intense police state repression called the Great Purge — would have killed for the powers that the U.S. president holds because of FISA and the proliferation of industrial “data brokers” online.
“Stalin would have wished he had something like FISA,” Prochko recently wrote. “Not because of the lack of warrants — the KGB definitely didn’t care about that — but because of something just as, if not more, sinister: the government’s practice of buying American citizens’ data from data brokers.”
As Prochko explains, the heavily left-leaning Big Tech industry in Silicon Valley has spun up Internet-era commerce into an Orwellian surveillance state. “Data brokers collect an obscene amount of data on everyone who uses the internet.”
Congress exempts themselves from:
-ObamaCare.
-Vaccine mandates.
-Insider trading crimes.
-Freedom of Information Act.
-FISA.
-Retaliation from whistleblowers.They can’t even close the border to protect its citizens.
Your enemy is not overseas, it is right here in America.
— Steve 🇺🇸 (@SteveLovesAmmo) April 16, 2024
“The types of places we’re searching on Google Maps? Collected and sold,” Prochko wrote. “The type of content we read the most often? Collected and sold. The ads we don’t skip over? Collected and sold. Even key words we say in conversations that our phone mics pick up — collected and sold.”
“Worse, we willingly give this information away every time we hit ‘accept all’ on terms and conditions — terms and conditions we must accept to use pretty much any part of the internet,” he added.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) excoriated Johnson on “Fox News Sunday” for voting with Democrats. “Speaker Johnson was incredibly wrong. He broke the tie. He voted with the Democrats. Here we have the leader of the Republicans in the House [voting] with the Democrats against a warrant requirement.”
ICYMI: Today I joined #Kudlow on @Foxbusiness to discuss FISA, foreign aid, the border, and more! pic.twitter.com/M90KkKvFS1
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) April 16, 2024