The National Security Agency’s (NSA) claim that the Patriot Act allowed bulk data collection of Americans’ private phone data is a false one, according to the main author of that law, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.
Data mining of Americans’ phone calls and information was specifically prohibited by the Patriot Act, said on The Hannity Show Monday.
“[We] insisted on putting [that] in there,” said Sensenbrenner. “The problem is that the secret FISA court turned the word ‘relevance’ on its head and authorized the NSA to go data mining and to have bulk collection.”
Sensenbrenner wrote in a 2013 op-ed that the administration “claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can.”
“I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law,” wrote Sensenbrenner.
“The Freedom Act puts an end to bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, not just under the Patriot Act, but under other laws,” said Sensenbrenner. The Senate passed the Freedom Act on Tuesday, after it failed to act in time to stop certain surveillance authorities from expiring on Sunday.
Americans’ spoken phone conversations cannot be accessed without a court order, Sensenbrenner clarified, but all texts, emails and other electronic data could be mined without a warrant by the NSA. This includes the GPS geo-tracking data that most mobile devices transmit, reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group.
Sensenbrenner told Hannity that most communications between Americans have been intercepted by the NSA, and that the NSA stores it in “a huge, electronic storage facility west of Salt Lake City, Utah.”
“The difference between what the NSA has been doing and the Freedom Act is that the government will no longer store any records,” said Sensenbrenner.
However, phone companies will hold the records for the NSA to access. Sensenbrenner asserts that the NSA will need a warrant to see the data, although others like Fox senior judicial analyst Judge Napolitano disagree.
“The Freedom Act gets the NSA physically out of the telecoms’ offices, but lets them come back in digitally whenever one of these secret FISA courts says so, and the standard for saying so is not probable cause as the Constitution requires,” wrote Napolitano in an op-ed. “It is whatever the government wants and whenever it wants it.”
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