Obama Steps Up Pressure for Renewal of Surveillance Measures
President Barack Obama is stepping up pressure on the U.S. Senate, which appears set for a political showdown Sunday when it meets only hours before some key surveillance powers of the National Security Agency are set to expire.
Before both chambers of Congress left for a one-week recess, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act. That compromise legislation would end bulk collection of Americans’ phone records but let the NSA search the records held by phone companies on a case-by-case basis.
Obama strongly urged the Senate to act quickly Sunday to pass the House bill before three provisions of the USA Patriot Act, enacted in 2001, expire. The president said Friday that he met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the White House to discuss a number of issues, including the NSA measures.
The president said he needed to remind everyone that at midnight Sunday, a range of authorities that the U.S. intelligence community uses to track terrorists would expire.
He said he had indicated to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that he expected the Senate to act quickly to pass the USA Freedom Act. Obama said there are Democratic and Republican lawmakers in both the House and the Senate who think the compromise bill is the way to go. He said the only thing in the way is a handful of senators who are resisting reform.
The president said "heaven forbid" a terrorist attack occur that could have been prevented if these programs were in place.
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Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act.
The USA Freedom Act is perceived as containing several concessions to pro-surveillance legislators meant to facilitate its passage, such as extending the Patriot Act powers until 2019. Many civil liberties groups believe that the USA Freedom Act doesn't go far enough. "This bill would make only incremental improvements, and at least one provision-the material-support provision-would represent a significant step backwards," ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement. "The disclosures of the last two years make clear that we need wholesale reform." Jaffer wants Congress to let Section 215 sunset completely and wait for a better reform package than endorse something half-baked.
Members of the anti-surveillance Civil Liberties Coalition are dismissing the USA Freedom Act in support of the Surveillance State Repeal Act, a far more comprehensive piece of legislation in the House that completely repeals the Patriot Act, as well as 2008's FISA Amendments Act. A group of 60 organizations called Congress to not stop at ending the NSA's bulk collection of telephone information under the USA PATRIOT Act, but to also end the FISA Amendments Act and Executive Order 12333 mass surveillance programs and restore accountability for bad actors in the Intelligence Community.
The Center for Democracy and Technology endorses the bill, but it points out that it doesn't limit data retention for information collected on people who turn out to have no connection to a suspect or target, and emphasizes that this is not an omnibus solution. The group argued the bill had to be supported because "the Senate will weaken the USA FREEDOM Act right before the sunset deadline, forcing the House to accept a weaker bill".
“This bill purports to ban certain acts under narrow authorities, but it doesn’t ban those behaviors outright. Nor does it increase meaningful oversight of the NSA," said David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, who wants Section 215 to expire. The group said "a vote for a bill that does not end mass surveillance is a vote in support of mass surveillance."
"Companies are provided monetary incentive to spy and share that information with the government and blanket liability once they do under USA Freedom -- even if that breaks that law," said Sascha Meinrath, the director of X-lab, an independent tech policy institute previously associated with New America. "Once companies receive that, they'll have almost no reason to weigh in on meaningful surveillance reform." "In a way, it's kind of like PRISM," the program revealed by Snowden where major tech companies turned over the content of online communications to the NSA, said longtime independent surveillance researcher Marcy Wheeler. "It pushes things to providers: Everyone gets immunity, but it doesn't add to the privacy."
“We think of the USA Freedom Act as yesterday’s news,” said Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, “and we’re interested in forcing the (intelligence) agencies into a future where they comply with constitutional limits.” “If passed, it’ll be the only step,” predicted Patrick Eddington of the Cato Institute, a former House staffer, since the next expiration date for a major piece of surveillance legislation is 31 December 2017.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act#Civil_liberties_groups
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