Lawmakers
Introduce Legislation to "Put a Stake in the Heart" of NSA's Domestic
Phone Spying
commondreams.org
Friday,
March 29, 2019
"The
NSA's sprawling phone records dragnet was born in secrecy, defended with lies,
and never stopped a single terrorist attack," said Sen. Ron Wyden
Fight
for the Future campaigner Laila Abdelaz said the new legislation is "a
welcome and necessary first-step in a longer fight to dismantle the U.S.
government's sprawling surveillance state." (Image: EFF Photos/flickr/cc)
In a
move welcomed by civil liberties advocates, a bipartisan group of lawmakers
introduced legislation to end once and for all the National Security Agency's
authority for mass surveillance of Americans' phone records.
"It's
a welcome and necessary first-step in a longer fight to dismantle the U.S.
government's sprawling surveillance state," said Fight
for the Future campaigner Laila Abdelaziz.
Entitled
the "Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act,"
the legislation was
introduced Thursday in the Senate by Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.),
while Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) introduced a companion
measure in the House.
"The
NSA's sprawling phone records dragnet was born in secrecy, defended with lies,
and never stopped a single terrorist attack," Wyden said in a statement.
"Even
after Congress acted in 2015, the program collected over half a billion phone
records in a single year. It's time, finally, to put a stake in the heart of
this unnecessary government surveillance program and start to restore some of
Americans' liberties," he said.
"In
particular," as Spencer Ackerman reported for The
Daily Beast,
the bill would kill off what's called
the Call Detail Records program under an effort to restrict the domestic
phone-data dragnet in the wake of Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations.
Before the so-called USA FREEDOM Act became law in 2015, some civil
libertarians warned that its privacy protections, watered down by
intelligence officials and their allies, would prove inadequate.
They turned out to be prescient: the FREEDOM Act led to an
overcollection of call data so massive that the NSA announced
last it was deleting the entire FREEDOM Act trove, which included some 685 million
phone records.
The failure of the USA FREEDOM Act
was significant
enough that the Trump administration "actually hasn't been
using it for the past six months," a national-security aide to House
Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy told the Lawfare
podcast earlier this month.
The
Call Detail Records (CDR) program—which uses the authority of Section 215 of
the PATRIOT Act—said Free Presss Action's Sandra Fulton, "represents an
egregious violation of our rights and it must end."
"Even
if the NSA has reportedly stopped using this dragnet approach now," she
continued, "we need the certainty that this bill provides against it
restarting on the basis of Section 215 or some other government theory."
Fight
for the Future's Abdelaziz said her group hopes the measure "is the
first-step in many others taken by this Congress to end the USA PATRIOT Act and
restore key civil liberties required for a healthy democratic society."
The
ACLU agreed that
ending the phone spying "should be a no-brainer for Congress."
"But
just ending that one authority isn't enough," the group added.
Ending
the NSA's phone surveillance authority should be a no-brainer for Congress. The
program has no proven intelligence value, violates our privacy, and has been
plagued with compliance issues.
But just ending that one authority isn't enough.
But just ending that one authority isn't enough.
Congress
needs to enact broader reforms that go beyond ending the NSA's surveillance of
call records.
This includes scaling back surveillance authorities to:
limit large-scale collection of data
prevent discrimination and First Amendment violations
increase transparency
This includes scaling back surveillance authorities to:
limit large-scale collection of dataprevent discrimination and First Amendment violationsincrease transparency
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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