SurveillanceSenate passes surveillance reform
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.
