By Cliff Montgomery – Nov. 29th, 2017
Since Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government employs a previously little-known section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to potentially spy on every American citizen, there has been a real push to bring back meaningful constitutional and legal accountability for federal officials.
A new attempt to address the issue appears to be the so-called USA Liberty Act of 2017, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Mike Lee [R-UT] and Patrick Leahy [D-VT]. Representatives Bob Goodlatte [R-VA], John Conyers [D-MI] and Jim Sensenbrenner [R-WI] are among the sponsors of the U.S. House version.
Among other things, the proposal was created “to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to clarify and improve the procedures and accountability for authorizing certain acquisitions of foreign intelligence,” or so states the introduction to the potential legislation.
But while the bill may address some of the most blatant spying abuses – for instance, the Senate version forces government officials to obtain a warrant before they may search the data they collect – it’s clear that “the first draft of the bill falls short,” according to an analysis released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a leading privacy watchdog.
Why is this such a huge issue?
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect numerous emails and other communications between foreigners living overseas and Americans – which in this globalized, digital age, means that the private communications of U.S. citizens now are routinely collected without a warrant.
“Agents for the NSA, CIA, and FBI have long rifled through the communications collected under Section 702,” according to the EFF analysis, that included “American communications, as well as the communications of foreigners who have no connection to crime or national security threats.”
“With no approval from a judge, they’re able to search this database of communications using a range of personal identifiers,” added the EFF, “then review the contents of communications uncovered in those searches.”
How large is this spy net? In 2013, the Washington Post quoted a top U.S. intelligence official who declared that the NSA director for Presidents Bush and Obama had a simple data collection policy:
“Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ … Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”
However, Section 702 has to be re-authorized every few years – hence the reason for the flurry of activity on this pressing matter.
But privacy experts say that this legislative proposal for the FISA law fails to solve basic legal issues.
For instance, the EFF states that the NSA would still be allowed to collect information on innocent people. And the bill’s “new reporting requirements, new defaults around data deletion, and new guidance for amicus engagement with the FISA Court” continue to allow federal officials to engage in questionable activities like so-called “backdoor searches”- reviews of the communications U.S. Internet users have with foreigners via major online networks like Facebook, Google and Yahoo.
All the same, ACLU counsel Neema Singh Guliani told journalists that the Senate legislation is more constitutionally sound than the House bill, since it does possess a warrant requirement.
