Senate passes surveillance reform
“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.
