The upcoming weeks could be pivotal for privacy advocates fighting for reforms on the Hill, with two important bills nearing Senate votes.
First, the Senate is expected to vote on reforming the National Security Agency this week, with a bill that passed the House in May.
The USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and cosponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz, would restrict the NSA from collecting bulk data on Americans’ phone records and bulk internet metadata. In the future, the NSA would require a court order to go through phone records.
It would also allow privacy advocates a representative in the secret court that oversees the NSA. And it would permit technology companies to report the number and type of government requests they receive, a move favored by companies like Facebook whose reputations have been harmed by Snowden’s revelations.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Apple all back the bill. In an open letter to the Senate, the companies write that the bill “both protects national security and reaffirms America’s commitment to the freedoms we all cherish.”
But one noted critic of the NSA is not on board: Sen. Rand Paul plans to vote against the bill unless it revokes its extension of the Patriot Action from June 2015 to December 201, among other concerns.
“Sen. Paul does not feel that Sen. Leahy’s reforms go far enough. There are significant problems with the bill, the most notable being an extension of the Patriot Act through December 2017,” a Paul aide said last week.
Although the bill started out with strong privacy protections, over time it has weakened its language to the point where some privacy advocates seem to be only begrudgingly backing it. In particular, they worry that the language is overly broad, and would easily allow the NSA to abuse and get around its restrictions.
Whatever USA Freedom Act’s fate, it will likely both impact and be impacted by a second bill in the Senate: the Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Act (CISA). CISA would grant infrastructure companies protection to share cyber threat information with the government. It passed the House in July. Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is its co-author.
Some worry that passing USA Freedom Act would weaken CISA, or vice versa. “If CISA passes, it is quite literally an exemption to existing privacy protections,” Gabe Rottman of the American Civil Liberties Union told The Hill.
