Download or read book The Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013 written by Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law Committee and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-03-11 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans understand that we need to give due weight to privacy, on the one hand, and national security, on the other. But Americans are also naturally suspicious of executive power, and when the Government does things secretly, Americans tend to think that power is being abused. For months now, there has been a steady stream of news stories about the NSA's surveillance programs. And yet right now, by law, Americans cannot get really the most basic information about what is going on with these programs. Consider this: It has been months since the PRISM program and the telephone call records program were revealed to the public. And yet to this day, Americans do not know the actual number of people whose information has been collected under those programs; they do not know how many of those people are American; and they have no way of knowing how many of these Americans have had their information actually seen by government officials—as opposed to just being held in a database.