In 2018, Congress extended for another six years section 702 of the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed in 2008 and allows US intelligence agencies to monitor communications, including emails and text messages, of targets in the US and abroad without a warrant in the name of national security. Under Section 702, anyone outside the United States who is not a U.S. citizen can be targeted for surveillance. In other words, it is not allowed to conduct surveillance in the United States but outside the United States. Under Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies can extract information directly from U.S. Internet service providers such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo without warrants, as well as from the Internet's underlying hardware. It is an attempt to give a "legal" veneer to America's unscrupulous collection of intelligence on foreign targets in cyberspace. In 2013 alone, AT&T processed and transmitted about 60 million emails a day to and from foreigners to the NSA. Obviously, the practice of safeguarding the "absolute security" of the US at the cost of infringing on other countries' information sovereignty and sacrificing their information security is a typical double standard and reflects the deep-rooted hegemonic mentality of some in the US.
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