Leahy, Franken Surveillance Revamp Bills Likely to See Movement, Says CDT Staff
Congress is likely to make progress on some privacy bills introduced after a summer of leaks about government surveillance programs, said staffers at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) during a news briefing Thursday. One such “bill to watch” is the FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act, introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., because it was “introduced by a committee chairman who has the power to move his bill,” said Greg Nojeim, director of CDT’s Project on Freedom, Security and Technology. Nojeim also said he was optimistic about bills to revise the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., “wants to do a comprehensive bill, and they're working on coming up with something,” he said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
On the company disclosure front, the bill to watch is the Surveillance Transparency Act by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., said Kevin Bankston, director of CDT’s Free Expression Project. The bill, S-1452, addresses concerns raised by a July letter sent by a coalition of privacy advocates and companies that asked for Congress to give companies the ability to report the specific number of requests they receive for user data under national security authorities and the number of accounts affected. While Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has pledged to disclose surveillance figures, “the limited data he described may be more misleading than useful, which is why it’s important to have numbers from the companies as well,” Bankston said.
The surveillance leaks leave members of Congress “concerned that they have been left in the dark,” Nojeim said. Even this past week, when the U.S. government was ordered to release surveillance documents, disclosures have shown a “complete failure of what was thought to be a very robust oversight system,” which “has to be troubling to members of Congress,” he said. The House Judiciary Committee will hold a closed hearing on authorities under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, he said. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing “at some point this work period,” he continued. “We don’t yet know when, and we don’t know what the topic of the hearing will be."
The EU data regulation discussions and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations will be affected by revelations about U.S. surveillance programs, said Jens-Henrik Jeppesen, CDT director-European affairs. “There is a sense among some European policymakers and also business, that if we were able to create a sort of European cloud, we'd be able to keep European data secure from unwarranted access” by American intelligence agencies, he said. American cloud companies have lost foreign business, and the government needs to work on “rebuilding trust in the American cloud,” Bankston said.
The surveillance revelations have put the U.S. in a compromised position in global discussions about Internet governance, said Matthew Shears, director of CDT’s Project on Global Internet Policy and Human Rights. “The [Edward] Snowden revelations have made the U.S. … Internet freedom agenda somewhat moot.” Countries involved in the World Conference on International Telecommunications may “now feel emboldened by the Snowden revelations,” he said. “Those same issues that were raised in Dubai last year will come back to the fore over the next few months,” and the U.S. has a “significantly more difficult and significantly more complex” task because of the revelations about the surveillance it conducts.
The state of Do Not Track (DNT) discussions at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is “in somewhat of a limbo,” said Justin Brookman, director of CDT’s Project on Consumer Privacy. The group will decide in the next month as to whether it should move forward, he said. Brookman called the Cookie Clearinghouse -- an initiative out of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society that seeks to distinguish third parties based on whether users have a relationship with them -- “worthwhile.” The Cookie Clearinghouse, which has the support of Firefox maker Mozilla, “and similar efforts by the browsers are putting the fear of God” into the online advertising industry, which is encouraging those companies to remain W3C participants, Brookman said.
Brookman spoke about the need for a baseline privacy law, such as the one promised by the White House. “We're one of two Western democracies that doesn’t have such a law,” he said. The group is hopeful that such a bill will be introduced in the Senate this fall, while the House moves forward with its bipartisan Privacy Working Group, he said. Because privacy bills are not moving significantly in Congress, “you're starting to see states take the initiative,” Brookman said, pointing to a recently passed DNT bill in California. “I think you're going to see a lot more of that” if Congress doesn’t make progress in the online privacy realm, he said. -- Kate Tummarello ( (ktummarello@warren-news.com)