The White House is increasing pressure on the Senate to
figure out how to save the Patriot Act before major provisions expire on Monday. That includes President Obama telling reporters that Congress needs to act to "keep the American people safe and secure." The White House's preferred option is the House-passed USA Freedom Act, which maintains the dragnet surveillance of phone metadata, but makes telecoms responsible for holding the date. That administration's push includes this bit of fearmongering from Attorney General Loretta Lynch:
AG Lynch: "Without action from the Senate, we will experience a serious lapse" in anti-terror surveillance
— @jamiedupree
That's just a week after the Inspector General of the Justice Department—her shop—issued a
report that states that FBI personnel were "unable to identify any major case developments that resulted from use of the records obtained through use of Section 215 orders." While they said there was some use in the dragnet surveillance in corroborating information
they already had, there was no finding that the lapse of the bulk collection program the administration is trying to maintain would harm national security. That's in part because there are
plenty of other tools the government can use to track actual terrorists.
It can use administrative subpoenas or grand jury subpoenas. It can use pen registers. It can use national security letters. It can use orders served under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. If Section 215 sunsets, it can use the provision that Section 215 amended, which will allow it to collect business records of hotels, motels, car and truck rental agencies, and storage rental facilities.
There are actually a few other things that IG report contained that Lynch
should be paying more attention to. Like the fact that the FBI, which actually administers the program and makes the applications for collections to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on behalf of NSA and itself, "took seven years to obey a law intended to protect Americans' privacy" passed in 2005. Beginning no later than 2006, the FBI was supposed to be using "minimization procedures" to limit the amount of private information about Americans that it kept and disseminated. It didn't comply with that requirement until March of 2013. In the intervening seven years, it sent who knows how many collection applications to the FISC on behalf of itself and the NSA. It purposefully did not comply with the 2005 law because it unilaterally decided that their old requirements were sufficient.
This is a program overdue for reform and oversight. That's where the administration should be directing its energies, not to mention Congress. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is clearly not going to get his way—Congress will simply just not reauthorize the program for any length of time. The confluence of the IG report on the program and the imminent expiration of it gives the reformers a very real opportunity to end this program.
Send this letter to Congress. Demand that Section 215 and other provisions expire once and for all.
