What is the USA Freedom Act?
The Senate voted 77-17 Sunday night to bring the USA Freedom Act to the floor for debate, a bill which passed the House last week with majority bipartisan support. It includes protections that the USA Patriot Act, which expired midnight May 31, did not.
Does it end the bulk data collection of Americans’ phone records?
No, but it changes who keeps them and for how long. Instead of the NSA storing those records for 5 years, phone companies would store the data for 18 months, with the option to hold it longer.
Does it stop the NSA from accessing Americans’ phone data?
No, the NSA would still be able to search phone company records.
Will the government need a warrant to examine Americans’ phone data?
No. The Freedom Act allows the agency without a warrant to gain access to phone data of all Americans digitally, even those of people who do not have contact with suspects.
So how is it different than the Patriot Act provisions it replaces?
It ends the NSA’s collection of Americans’ calling records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Two important distinctions here:
1. The use of the word collection: In the new bill, phone companies collect the data and will store that data for the NSA to see.
2. Section 215 is not the only section that the NSA has used to determine it has legal authority to collect bulk data information on Americans.
The bill also ends the use of national security letters, a tool with which intelligence agencies use secretly to request data from Internet and phone companies. Instead, the NSA will need permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, which meets in secret.
Other controversial mass surveillance programs, such as section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and the PRISM program, will remain in place.
What are the other controversial mass surveillance programs that collect Americans’ data?
The government has used Section 702 to collect international call and email records, while the NSA’s secret PRISM program, begun in 2007, collects data of Internet use.
The USA Freedom Act also expands corporate immunity for those companies that give the government data and to those that supply technical assistance with surveillance.
The act will make the secret FISA court more transparent in three key ways:
1. It will mandate the appointment of five special civil liberties advisers
2. It will declassify significant FISA court opinions. Significant is defined as novel constructions or interpretations of a “specific selection term.”
3. The government will be required to disclose to Congress how many FISA court orders have been requested, the type of applications and the number of people targeted.
Is the government collection of Americans’ bulk data constitutional?
There are several open lawsuits asking this question. A May ruling by federal district court Judge Gerard E. Lynch said Section 215 never legally authorized what the government was doing, and called the spying an “unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans.”
