US lawmakers campaign to curb the governmentâ„¢s massive NSA spying program is because congressmen could be the main victims of the program themselves, a political analyst tells Press TV.
In a close 205-217 vote, the US House of Representatives rejected an amendment on Wednesday to curb domestic spying by the National Security Agency, which would have required the government to identify a person under investigation before it could collect the personâ„¢s call records.
However, US lawmakers have vowed to step up their campaign against the program saying they will bring the issue up again for a vote at the earliest opportunity.
Å“I think that the closeness of the vote shows one of the critical issues here namely that the most likely victims of this kind of spying are going to be the Congressmen themselves, the judiciary, the executive,” E. Michael Jones, the editor of Culture Wars Online Magazine from South Bend, Indiana, said in an exclusive interview with Press TV on Friday.
The analyst noted that due to the vast amount of data, much of the information gathered by the program is useless and hard to sort through Å“but if you know what you are looking for, then it does become politically useful and the easiest way to know what you are looking for is to focus it on influential people.”
Å“So I think the irony here is that the Congress passed the bill that is now going to be used against them, files are going to be held on congressmen and they will be used to blackmail them into going along with the party line,” he added.
The Wednesday vote was the first attempt in the US House to curb the NSAâ„¢s spying program since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about the US surveillance program.
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Republished from: Press TV