[caption id=”attachment_130909″ align=”aligncenter” width=”644″] (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
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As of today, three Patriot Act provisions—including Section 215, which the government used to justify its mass data collection—have expired.
The White House, Mitch McConnell, and others have been touting this as the doomsday of surveillance. But many experts are skeptical of whether any surveillance will have actually ended at all.
First there’s the possibility that the NSA will manage to “grandfather in” their Section 215 investigations and find other loopholes to justify its continued use. From the New York Times:
Even last week, when officials claimed to be shutting down the program in anticipation of its sunset, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr told National Journal that the administration was being “disingenuous.” “The database doesn’t go poof and go away,” he said.
Bloomberg’s Eli Lake also took the dubious approach to the day’s news, arguing that “There are probably workarounds that let the government continue its surveillance of bad guys, citing authorities other than the lapsed provisions of the Patriot Act or even relying on some ‘fuzziness’ in the Patriot Act, to use Senator Bob Corker’s term from Sunday night.”
Perhaps the biggest question now is what will happen to the USA Freedom Act—a middle-ground bill that has gone through many different iterations, and which Mitch McConnell is seeking to once more amend.
The USA Freedom Act would require the government to obtain records from phone companies with court approval, rather than storing them en masse.
McConnell’s controversial amendments would include doubling the NSA’s transition time to adopt the new rules, and mandating that phone companies notify the government when they make changes to their data storing policies. Privacy advocates object to this as akin to a “data retention mandate,” granting too much power to the government over private information.
Another amendment would stretch the transition away from the NSA’s domestic phone-records dragnet from six months to a year. That time frame is shorter than the two years sought by Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, but it was still quickly batted away as a nonstarter by privacy advocates.
The Senate may pass some version of this bill on Tuesday. But it’s not clear how receptive the House would be to these amendments.
“I hear a lot about things they want to do over in the Senate. I think the best thing for the Senate to do is to take up the House bill and send it to the president,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Monday.
