The Obama administration has no alternative plan for conducting critical surveillance activities outside a decision by Congress to extend or amend authorities in the USA Patriot Act that are due to expire next week, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
That’s an unsettling prospect for those who support the current authority to collect bulk phone data, since the Senate showed Saturday that there is no agreement to either expand or amend that authority. The Senate returns Sunday, May 31, in an effort to pass some kind of extension.
Earnest said if the Senate fails to act on Sunday, “then yes, these programs will lapse.”
“I’m not aware of any kind of ‘Plan B’ that exists or is being contemplated,” Earnest said. He also added, “Senate is failing to do its job.”
Earnest also appeared to take a jab at Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Tuesday morning, Paul said President Obama was being “disingenuous” on the surveillance authorities because they were put in place by executive order, and that Obama could therefore eliminate them by executive order.
Earnest said “political ambitions of some members of the U.S. Senate are going to have to come second” to national security. Earnest also rejected Paul’s assertion, and argued that the legal authorities provided to intelligence agencies in the House-passed USA Freedom Act “are the kinds of authority that can only be authorized by Congress.”
If they are allowed to lapse, it would take away a tool national security agencies need to keep the U.S. safe, Earnest said.
“If the Senate doesn’t act, there is no way to prevent those authorities from expiring,” Earnest said. He was referring to the controversial section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the NSA cites as the legal basis for collecting “metadata,” or time-stamp information, from phone records.
Two other major Patriot Act provisions also expire at midnight Sunday: the provision making it easier to track “lone-wolf” terrorist suspects, and language allowing roving wiretaps.
The House-passed USA Freedom Act would reauthorize the latter two authorities and tweak Section 215 so that telecom companies, and not the NSA, would hold the timestamp information.
Speaking to a small group of reporters after meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Obama urged the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act.
“This needs to get done,” Obama said, according to a White House pool report.
