In the aftermath of the revelations that the National Security Agency conducted a widespread surveillance program involving end-user data from several of the largest telecommunications and Internet companies, a slew of bills and reforms has emerged in Congress in response to the national debate over national security and personal liberty. Despite the proposals, Congress’ response has been glacially slow and appears to be currently stalled.
Among the proposed bills is Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) proposal that federal agencies must have a court-issued warrant based on probable cause in order to access private and public phone records. Meanwhile, Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) are floating a proposal that requires a “demonstrated link to terrorism or espionage” for the government to collect data digitally. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) would declassify and make public the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s decisions, while Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is pushing to modify the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to expand judicial oversight, public accountability and transparency.
Congressional apathy
None of these proposals have a timeline or are currently on the Senate’s calendar. While Leahy has held hearings addressing the NSA issue in the Senate Judiciary Committee, none of the bills have progressed any further than the Merkley-Lee proposal, which earned the endorsement of 12 co-sponsors. The slow progress is in part due to the fact that Congress does not, in general, have a problem with the way the intelligence community operates.
“It’s not an issue of whether anyone cares or not,” said Jim Manley, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) former top spokesman. “I think that the fact is, based on the intelligence briefings that they have received, that many members support the NSA programs because they honestly believe that the country faces some very real threats from individuals and organizations that want to do real damage to this country.”
This, combined with the recent Supreme Court decision invalidating a critical part of the Voting Rights Act, has drawn the Senate’s attention away from the NSA issue. For most in the Senate, the NSA controversy is more a matter of keeping up appearances for the voters than actually making changes. Only a vocal minority is pushing for the issue to stay alive.
“The secret collection of the phone records of millions of Americans reminds us why we need sensible limits on the government’s surveillance powers,” Udall said in a statement to the Huffington Post. “Now is the time to have an informed public debate about how we protect our cherished Constitutional rights while also keeping our nation secure.”
“We need to have a debate over the extent of our surveillance state,” said a Senate Democratic aide to the Huffington Post. “And if we don’t start that debate soon in Congress, the public’s attention will move on to other matters, if it hasn’t already.”
Forcing Congress to respond
This debate is in part fueled by the lack of transparency. On June 11, Google wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney general and the director of the FBI, requesting permission to publish more details on the requests for data it had received from the government.
“Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue,” wrote David Drummond, the chief legal officer for Google. “However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.”
In light of Congress’ apathy, a coalition of the largest names in the world of the Internet has gathered to call on Congress to address NSA and FBI data collection. The coalition includes Mozilla, the creator of the Firefox browser; Tim Berners-Lee, the credited inventor of the World Wide Web; the Green Party of the United States; Freedom Works; OccupyWallSt.org and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to name a few.
“The Washington Post and the Guardian recently published reports based on information provided by an intelligence contractor showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments,” read the group’s letter to Congress. “As reported, the U.S. government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. As a result, the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist organization.”
“This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy,” the letter continued. “This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously, guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, and protect their right to privacy.”
A popular movement
Since the beginning of the Stop Watching Us campaign, 520,000 people have signed the online petition demanding that Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA surveillance operations, nearly 1 million emails have been sent to the members of Congress, and 15,000 minutes of calls to lawmakers have been tallied in a switchboard-clogging attempt to gain Congress’s attention.
“When we look back at the public response to SOPA/PIPA, two Congressional anti-piracy bills, where Mozilla and other organizations asked the public to get involved, we were blown away by the response,” wrote Alex Fowler, a privacy and public policy expert for Mozilla, in a blog post. “Hundreds of thousands of people contacted their representatives with concerns over the potential impact to the Web. We saw the same thing with ACTA in the EU. We need to rekindle that energy more than ever so our elected officials take the necessary actions to illuminate how current surveillance policies are being implemented.
“Mozilla believes in an Internet where we do not have to fear that everything we do is being tracked, monitored and logged by either companies or governments. And we believe in a government whose actions are visible, transparent and accountable.”
While the movement is in its infancy and it is not yet clear whether it will reach the level of the protests against SOPA and PIPA — in which millions participated and several websites went offline in solidarity — or even if it will sway Congress in any measurable way, the call for action has helped to re-energize a discussion that many feel is essential to keep the NSA surveillance issue in the public’s consciousness.
“Time and again, a program like this is claimed to be nothing to worry about and [is] claimed to be absolutely vital to stopping terror and protecting Americans,” said Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute. “Then those claims turn out, repeatedly, not to pan out.”