U.S. Congress Reforms Surveillance Law
June 4, 2015
The U.S. Senate passed legislation on June 2 that rolled back some of the secrecy and data-collection powers of the National Security Agency (NSA). With support from both Republicans and Democrats, the Senate voted 67 to 32 to pass the legislation, known as the USA Freedom Act. U.S. President Barack Obama promptly signed it into law.
The USA Freedom Act renews—and reforms—the surveillance (monitoring) authority granted by the USA Patriot Act, which became law shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The Patriot Act granted the U.S. government the authority to collect and analyze phone records, e-mails, Internet traffic, and other data, in an effort to identify and prevent terrorist attacks. In 2013, Edward Snowden, who worked as a contractor for the NSA, leaked documents revealing the vast extent of the surveillance and data-collection programs, shocking many Americans. Parts of the Patriot Act were set to expire on June 1, 2015, prompting the new legislation.
The Freedom Act leaves the NSA’s Internet-monitoring powers intact. But it reforms a particularly controversial aspect of the NSA surveillance program—its bulk phone data collection. The NSA did not record the content of phone calls, but it collected and permanently stored data about the phone numbers, call lengths, and other identifying information for millions of American telephone users. Under the new legislation, the NSA can only store such data for six months. Then the phone companies must store the data, which the NSA can access with special court orders.
Those court orders are issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, established in 1978 to oversee the government’s surveillance activities. The new legislation forces the secretive FISA court to reveal records of some of its important decisions, which have until now been kept classified. In addition, the Freedom Act creates a new “public advocate” role to represent citizens’ privacy concerns in arguments before the FISA court.
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