AG Nominee Sessions' Hearings Raise Concerns About Privacy Protections, Says CDT
Last week's confirmation hearings of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., raised more questions than answers about how President-elect Donald Trump's choice for attorney general would protect privacy and civil liberties, wrote Center for Democracy & Technology fellow Natasha Duarte in a…
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Thursday blog post. She said Sessions opposed the USA Freedom Act, which ended NSA's bulk phone records collection program, though it never discovered or disrupted a terrorist plot. "However, at his confirmation hearing, Sessions would not admit that the USA Freedom Act bars the NSA from engaging in bulk collection of Americans’ phone records," she wrote. In Sessions' exchange with Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Pat Leahy, D-Vt., about the act (see 1701090038), Leahy was able to get Sessions to commit to upholding the law, she said, "but not a belief that the Act ends bulk collection, which was the overall purpose of the legislation." It left the door open for bulk collection, she noted. Duarte also said Sessions wouldn't commit to following DOJ standards for subpoenaing journalists, which raises a concern that the department "may conduct unnecessary or overly broad investigations of the news media."