http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/243983-spy-critics-eye-next-targets
Critics of government surveillance hope they’re in the middle of a sea change. Passage of legislation this week to rein in the National Security Agency was the first major congressional action to limit government spying in a generation, and it was a move away from the aggressive national security measures put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks. But whether the congressional view of surveillance has changed for good remains to be seen, with the battle over NSA reform set to play out again during the 2016 race for the White House. Civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle vowed to harness the momentum of their victory on the USA Freedom Act to push for other protections. “This is only the beginning,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of Congress’s most vocal privacy hawks. “There’s a lot more to do.”
The USA Freedom Act renews Section 215 of the Patriot Act and two other provisions that had expired on Monday morning. But in doing so, the act also ends the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records and other data. The bill reauthorizes the Patriot Act provisions through Dec. 15, 2019, setting the stage for another showdown during the next administration.
But civil libertarians want to go much further to curb government spying. For one, congressional privacy advocates want to tackle the “backdoor search loophole” of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While that provision is meant to allow the government to collect the communications of foreigners, the emails and chats of Americans can be “incidentally” picked up without a warrant under operations such as the NSA’s Prism and Upstream programs. Section 702 is up for renewal at the end of 2017, putting the best chance of reforming it more than two years away. “We’re going to use this period, between now and the formal expiration date, to make the case” for reining that law in, Wyden said.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) has also promised to hold hearings on the surveillance law in coming months, which could draw additional scrutiny. “That feels like a long time away, but honestly it’s not,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program. Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, which created the public uproar that made Tuesday’s vote possible, “feels like yesterday, and that was two years ago,” Goitein added. “The groundwork for that kind of change has to be laid over a long period.”
Civil libertarians this week listed a number of other changes they would like to tackle now that the USA Freedom Act is passed. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) — the odd couple behind the Senate’s passage of the USA Freedom Act — are now eyeing a 1986 law that allows government agents to obtain people’s emails without a warrant. Updating that law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, has been a priority for some lawmakers for years, but a proposal has yet to cross the finish line. Lawmakers in both chambers also have attempted to write legislation banning the government from forcing companies to build “backdoors” into their technology that would give law enforcement agencies access to data.
And Wyden and House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) have worked for years on a bill to prevent the government from tracking people’s cellphone or GPS location without a warrant. That bill would also include the use of StingRay devices, which are used by government agencies to mimic cell towers to pick up information from people’s phones.