The White House said Monday that the Senate needs to reauthorize antiterrorism provisions of the USA Patriot Act to ensure law enforcement have the tools to keep the country safe, even as it refused to say the country is categorically less safe because they have expired.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked a few times Monday whether the expiration of these provisions makes the country less safe, but he dodged that formulation, and instead said the now-expired tools in the law have the ability to keep people safe.
“The failure of the U.S. Senate to act has had an impact on authorities that national security [officials] can use to keep us safe,” Earnest said.
The intelligence community has other “tools” to track terrorist suspects, Earnest said, but there is no direct replacement for the tools that cannot be used now that certain provisions of the USA Patriot Act have expired.
Earnest blasted senators who are trying to amend the House-passed USA Freedom Act that would reauthorize those provisions as well as end the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone-records collection program.
“They’ve had one-and-a-half years” to use their prerogative to debate and amend the legislation, Earnest said, referring to how long it’s been since the USA Freedom Act was first introduced. Now that they’ve “blown past their deadline” they want to amend the bill, he said, referring to how those provisions’ authority expired at midnight.
Doing so could force the House to have to consider an amended version of the bill, further delaying the provisions’ reinstatement, Earnest said.
The provisions in question are: Section 215, the legal underpinning of the NSA’s bulk phone records’ collection program; roving wiretap authority; and the ability to keep tabs on “lone wolf” terrorist suspects. They were part of the USA Patriot Act that was passed in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Earnest said it is “ironic, to say the least,” that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blocked consideration of the USA Freedom Act because he opposes the phone records program and thinks the USA Patriot Act allows the intelligence community to infringe upon Americans’ civil liberties. He said the USA Freedom Act addresses Paul’s concerns.
“It might have been an effective campaign tactic but it was not good for the country,” Earnest said about Paul, who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination.
Even though a federal appeals court has ruled the NSA’s phone records program illegal, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, whose public revelations about the spying program’s existence prompted lawmakers to draft the USA Freedom Act, should not be granted leniency for his actions, Earnest said. “There are whistleblower protocols” available to government workers and contractors who uncover government wrongdoing and releasing sensitive information on the Internet for everyone, America’s enemies included, to see is not part of those protocols, Earnest said. He added that Snowden should return to the U.S. to answer for the “very serious crimes” he’s accused of committing.
