After Fearmongering Kills the NSA Reform Bill, What’s Next? [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/after-fearmongering-kills-nsa-reform-bill-whats-next

For a few hours on Tuesday, the Islamic State looked like the best thing that ever happened to the National Security Agency. The USA Freedom Act, a modest bill seen as the best chance for reforming one of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs, failed to clear a procedural hurdle in the Senate by two votes after Republicans insisted that it would precipitate a terrorist attack.

“This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our back,” Mitch McConnell said. “We live in a dangerous world, and the threat by ISIL only makes it more so.” Marco Rubio chimed in with his own warning: “God forbid that tomorrow we wake up to the news that a member of ISIL is in the United States,” he said. Former CIA director Michael Hayden penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed under the headline, “NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love.”

Really, the USA Freedom Act was NSA reform that no one really loved, except maybe the Obama administration. The bill had “strong support” from the White House and the intelligence agencies, from most of the reform-minded lawmakers and from the tech companies and many civil-liberties groups. And it did contain several provisions lauded by privacy advocates, such as placing special advocates on the secret court that authorizes surveillance requests to argue against the government, and forbidding the government itself from holding phone records.

But groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which deemed the legislation an “ important step forward,” were also clear that it addressed only a very small part of the government’s dragnet surveillance activities. Others thought the bill was so imprecise that it might have sanctioned, rather than ended, certain surveillance practices. Libertarian NSA critic Rand Paul objected because it didn’t go far enough—though before giving him too much credit for his principled stand note that he could have voted to move the bill forward and then offered amendments to address his concerns before a final vote. Ultimately, as Glenn Greenwald wrote at The Intercept, “There is a real question about whether the defeat of this bill is good, bad, or irrelevant.”