As Finnish people, can we do anything or is this just for the US citizens, Demian?
As far as I know we can't help.
i really think the nsa should be spying on people who have criminal backgrounds and such. innocent people should be left alone.
How do you who is innocent and who is a criminal? Sure the government knows who has been imprisoned but what about the banker currently conducting a two year long fraud and has not yet been detected?
tl;dr
The nsa was spying on some countries, and this bill removes all funding to the Nsa, so that they won't be able to do this.
No. This bill removes funding to the phone call metadata recording project of NSA. Not the entire organization.
They're only recording our metadata, aren't they? Doesn't that mean they don't know what was ACTUALLY IN the calls, it's just that if a criminal case comes along then they can check what numbers we talked to recently and when?
This might be false info but I remember reading about several cases where people in court have asked for the contents of years/months old (regular) phone calls to prove their innocence and they have gotten those calls as valid evidence in court.
I don't think "metadata" includes the audio itself.
Correct.
Yes I know what metadata means, but did the NSA confirm that they only collect metadata?
So you're trusting the secretive government organization currently doing the collecting themselves to confirm that they are indeed collecting only the metadata? In order to get concrete proof that they are only collecting the metadata a third-party non-government civilian organization would need to go and check out what NSA is really doing.