Leahy Seeks to Reform Patriot Act Surveillance Rules
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Wednesday he will reintroduce legislation Thursday aimed at reforming and increasing the transparency of the Patriot Act. “From National Security Letters to the latest revelations about the use of the Patriot Act, I remain concerned that we have not yet struck the right balance between the intelligence-gathering needs of the FBI, and the civil liberties and privacy rights of Americans,” Leahy said during an FBI oversight hearing. Leahy said the bill is based on legislation he offered in 2009 and 2011 that would expand public reporting on the use of National Security Letters, require the government to show relevance to an authorized investigation in order to obtain certain records, and amend disclosure rules regarding Section 215 of the Patriot Act, among other provisions. His spokeswoman would not confirm if the provisions of the soon-to-be reintroduced bill differ from the previous text of the legislation.
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Leahy “remains skeptical” that the NSA surveillance programs have “proved sufficiently effective to justify their breadth,” he said in his opening remarks. “For years, I have been troubled by the expansive nature of the USA Patriot Act. These powerful law enforcement tools, including Section 215 orders, require careful monitoring and close oversight,” he said.
FBI Director Robert Mueller re-affirmed the legality and constitutionality of the government’s surveillance programs and told lawmakers the programs could have identified and potentially prevented the 9/11 attacks if they had been in place prior to 2001. The 9/11 Commission indicated that investigating 9/11 bomber Khalid al-Mihdhar prior to the attacks could have yielded evidence of connections to other participants in the 9/11 plot, Mueller said. “Had we had this information we could have stopped the attack,” Mueller told lawmakers.
The NSA surveillance programs help the government “connect the dots” in terrorism investigations, said Mueller. He urged Congress not to shut down the monitoring program because they would be “removing the dots from the playing field,” he said. “You never know which dot is going to be key.”
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the government’s surveillance programs “are legal” and “carefully overseen,” by the judicial, legislative and executive branches. “If people are concerned about privacy I think the greatest threat to privacy is the drone,” she told Mueller at the hearing. Mueller acknowledged that the government has deployed drones over U.S. soil for surveillance purposes “in a very minimal way and very seldom.”
Privacy Subcommittee Chairman Al Franken, D-Minn., said he believes the government surveillance programs “provide reasonable safeguards, but I believe the government should be more transparent about the programs.” The difficulty is that “it is hard for Americans to debate the merits of a law when the law is kind of secret,” he told Mueller. Mueller pushed back on Franken’s call to usher in more transparency because he said de-classifying the details of the program would educate America’s adversaries about how to avoid surveillance.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said people are concerned that the government has conducted a “vast collection of information on Americans that aren’t related to an investigation.” Lee said “even if it is metadata, storing that metadata for a period of time … brings concerns about intrusions of privacy.” Mueller said the government’s collection of Americans’ metadata is “certainly constitutional” and “carries de minimis privacy concerns compared to other investigative tools.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he’s “concerned that this administration’s priorities on the war on terror have been misallocated” and said the president has been “less than vigorous in protecting the civil liberties rights of law abiding Americans.”