With two months until the USA PATRIOT Act is due for renewal, Mozilla has issued an open petition for individuals to sign, along with a letter to Congress calling for surveillance reform. In its letter, Mozilla urges Congress to ban bulk data collection and allow for “sufficient transparency” reporting as well as no new data retention mandates or surveillance authorities, powers or programs. In a column for Al Jazeera America, Joshua Kopstein opines that Americans “need a champion for privacy rights.” In another op-ed for The Hill, Tom Giovanetti writes that updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act would be “a win for Congress and for the American people, and it needs to move now, before presidential politics gums up the works in Congress.”
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