Bolstered by a historic court of appeals opinion from last week that ruled much of NSA’s mass surveillance on Americans illegal, Congress is scrambling to pass a reform bill for the NSA before 1 June, when a key section of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, will expire unless both houses vote to extend it. Now the only question is how far they’ll go.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act is the same law that a three judge panel on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled cannot be used by the NSA to collect every American’s phone records, which is exactly what they had been doing in secret for years before Edward Snowden revealed the program in his very first leak to the Guardian in June 2013.
The court ruling has left Congress reeling, where many thought they might be able to escape without doing much at all; now most members in both parties admit the question is not if the NSA will be constrained but by how much.
It’s hard to understate the 2nd Circuit ruling’s sweeping nature: not only did the three judge panel declare the notorious phone metadata program unlawful, but all other still secret mass surveillance programs are now illegal as well. (For example, Senator Richard Burr curiously claimed last week on the Senate floorthat the NSA is mining American IP addresses in bulk using the Patriot Act. When he was called out for seemingly making classified information public, his statements quickly disappeared from the official congressional record.)
It’s now virtually a foregone conclusion that a version of the USA Freedom Act – an NSA reform bill that has been re-written countless times over the past two years – will pass the House of Representatives by a large margin as early as Wednesday. While the bill is a milquetoast attempt to reform that’s been watered down since it was first introduced shortly after the Snowden leaks began in June 2013, most civil liberties experts agreed – at least before the 2nd Circuit ruling – the bill makes things better on the margins. It adds a little transparency and taking away the NSA’s vast phone database, but leaving it in the hands of the phone companies for the agency to continue to mine in secret
For more:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/13/nsa-reform-is-unavoidable-but-it-can-be-undermined-if-we-arent-careful?CMP=fb_gu