Senate passes surveillance reform

Senate passes surveillance reform

Published 3 June 2015

 

The U.S. Senate yesterday voted 67-32 to pass the House’s USA Freedom Act which would end the NSA collection of bulk metadata of Americans’ phone records. The bill will now head to the White House for the president to sign. The USA Freedom Act shifts the responsibility for keeping the phone records from the government to hundreds of separate phone carriers – but important questions remain. Thus it is not entirely clear how many records the carriers will keep, and for how long, and under what circumstances will they allow law enforcement to view these records. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), the Senate majority leader, who supported the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, said that the USA Freedom Act is “a resounding victory for those who currently plotted against our homeland. It does not enhance the privacy protections of American citizens, and it surely undermines American security by taking one more tool from our war fighters, in my view, at exactly the wrong time.”

The U.S. Senate yesterday voted 67-32 to pass the House’s USA Freedom Act which would end the NSA collection of bulk metadata of Americans’ phone records. The bill will now head to the White House for the president to sign. The USA Freedom Act shifts the responsibility for keeping the phone records from the government to hundreds of separate phone carriers – but important questions remain. Thus it is not entirely clear how many records the carriers will keep, and for how long, and under what circumstances will they allow law enforcement to view these records.
Civil libertarians argued that the bill did not go far enough. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) praised the passage of the USA Freedom Act as “a milestone,” but noted that there were many more “intrusive and overbroad” surveillance powers yet untouched.
“This is the most important surveillance reform bill since 1978, and its passage is an indication that Americans are no longer willing to give the intelligence agencies a blank check. It’s a testament to the significance of the Snowden disclosures and also to the hard work of many principled legislators on both sides of the aisle,” Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said in a statement.
The NSA, in anticipation of the a failure to pass the bill in the Senate — and certain that the original Section 215 of the Patriot Act would not be reauthorized — shut down the bulk collection of U.S. phone records at 8 p.m. EST on Sunday, 31 May. The Washington Post reports that the billcalls for a 6-month grace period to transition the retention of metadata to the phone companies, so until December the NSA will continue to collect metadata the way it has since it was authorized to do so in 2006.
A senior administration official told the Guardian the NSA was facing “a restarting process.”
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), a critic of NSA surveillance, praised the passage of the bill but said the work is far from complete.
“This is the only beginning. There is a lot more to do,” Wyden told reporters after the vote. “We’re going to have very vigorous debate about the flawed idea of the FBI director to require companies to build weaknesses into their products. We’re going to try to close the backdoor search loophole — this is part of the FISA Act and is going to be increasingly important, because Americans are going to have their emails swept up increasingly as global communications systems begin to merge.”
Wyden also pointed to a proposal in the House “to make sure government agencies don’t turn cell phones of Americans into tracking devices” as another target for NSA reformers.
The failure of the Senate on Sunday to vote to extend the Patriot Act, vote on the House bill, or come up with the Senate’s own bill was the result of a surprising miscalculation by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), the majority leader – surprising, because McConnell is a crafty and experienced vote counter and a consummate politician who can read the mood of fellow senators. McConnell’s Sunday humiliation was compounded when the Senate rejected s a series of amendments, advanced by McConnell and Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, which were aimed to weaken some of the surveillance and transparency aspects of the USA Freedom Act.
Among the amendments that failed were a measure to weaken the USA Freedom Act’s establishment of a de facto privacy advocate to argue, in certain cases, against the government on behalf of privacy rights; an effort to allow the phone collection program to continue for a year instead of just six months, as proposed by the House bill; and another provision requiring the U.S. intelligence chief to certify the implementation of the new phone-records regime.
McConnell and Burr were behind the failed effort – supported by most of the Republican caucus — to reauthorize the Patriot Act in its current form. That effort fell three votes short of the sixty votes necessary for passage.
McConnell defended his tactics in a forceful speech on the Senate floor.
The USA Freedom Act is “a resounding victory for those who currently plotted against our homeland,” he said. “It does not enhance the privacy protections of American citizens, and it surely undermines American security by taking one more tool from our war fighters, in my view, at exactly the wrong time.”
For privacy advocates in Congress, the USA Freedom Act is just the beginning. Libertarian Republicans in the House, who are allies of Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), the chief opponent of the Patriot Act, said they will try to use a defense appropriations bill as a vehicle to advance more surveillance reforms. Their efforts will include blocking the NSA from undermining encryption and barring other law enforcement agencies such as the FBI from collecting U.S. data in bulk.