President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed legislation reforming the National Security Agency’s bulk data-collection practices so that phone companies collect the call data and make it available for government perusal only after a court order requires it. This is a significant step toward balancing national security concerns with those about privacy – a source of constant tension in the U.S. effort to anticipate and thwart terror attacks. In approving the bill rolling back the NSA’s data collection authority, the Senate forewent Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s, R-Ky., repeated efforts to reauthorize that practice. The Senate and the U.S. House before it were right to do so.
The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act 67-32 on Tuesday, with just one Democrat joining the nays, while the yeas compriseda a bipartisan group of senators including both Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Cory Gardner, R-Colo. The House passed the measure last month 338-88; Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, voted yes on the bill. Obama swiftly signed the measure, closing a three-day gap during which data-collection authority had lapsed when the Senate failed to reach a vote Sunday. In reauthorizing many key provisions of the USA Patriot Act – the Freedom Act’s predecessor crafted just after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Congress is balancing the need to monitor for potentially dangerous activities against the need to protect Americans’ privacy.
The far-reaching allowances that the original Patriot Act contained were appropriate in the post-Sept. 11 environment. After nearly 15 years, though, it is equally appropriate to adjust them. That is an essential part of the policy process: evaluating and modifying policies to reflect the challenges and problems that arise during the implementation phase. This is the first time since the Patriot Act’s original passage that such adjustments have been made.
The NSA’s bulk data-collection practices as authorized by Congress had proved problematic. In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the scope and breadth of the agency’s surveillance practices, triggering a lengthy debate about just how far the government should be allowed to go in protecting national security. McConnell and his supporters championed the by-any-means-necessary approach that allowed the NSA to collect massive amounts of communications data from Americans under no suspicion of wrongdoing. A federal appeals court disagreed in May, saying the mass-collection practice was unconstitutional. A welcome majority in Congress stepped up to the task of recalibrating the surveillance program to require that the government, through its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, request access to communications records now to be held by the phone companies, not the NSA. The warrant requests must be specific and transparent. Formerly, no such requirement existed.
The USA Freedom Act’s passage is a bipartisan feat of great importance to Americans and to the United States’ efforts at anticipating and fending off threats to the country. That work is essential, as the Sept. 11 attacks proved, and many efforts since have reinforced. It should not, however, come at the cost of wholesale privacy for all.
“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,” Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN.
It is an appropriate balance, not without potential problems, but a needed step for Congress to take.
