{"id":13237,"date":"2015-06-03T08:48:06","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T12:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/usa-freedom-act-passes-what-we-celebrate-what-we-mourn-and-where-we-go-from-here-electronic-frontier-foundation.html"},"modified":"2015-06-03T09:44:24","modified_gmt":"2015-06-03T13:44:24","slug":"usa-freedom-act-passes-what-we-celebrate-what-we-mourn-and-where-we-go-from-here-electronic-frontier-foundation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/usa-freedom-act-passes-what-we-celebrate-what-we-mourn-and-where-we-go-from-here-electronic-frontier-foundation.html","title":{"rendered":"USA Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go From Here | Electronic Frontier Foundation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\r\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.occupycorporatism.com\/home\/facebook-google-usa-freedom-act-will-restore-customer-confidence\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right;border:none;width:300px\" src=\"http:\/\/www.occupycorporatism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/usa.freedom.act_.google.facebook.nsa_.spying_occupycorporatism.jpg\"><\/a>\r\nSusanne Posel, The US Independent, November 18, 2014,\r\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.occupycorporatism.com\/home\/facebook-google-usa-freedom-act-will-restore-customer-confidence\/\">\r\nFacebook, Google: USA Freedom Act Will Restore Customer Confidence<\/a>,\r\n<blockquote>\r\nThe Obama administration \u201cstrongly supports\u201d SB 2685, the USA Freedom Act (USFA) championed by Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) and co-sponsored by:\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Mike Lee\r\n<li>Dick Durbin\r\n<li>Dean Heller\r\n<li>Al Franken\r\n<li>Ted Cruz\r\n<li>Richard Blumenthal\r\n<li>Tom Udal\r\n<li>Chris Coons\r\n<li>Martin Heinrich\r\n<li>Ed Markey\r\n<li>Mazie Hirono\r\n<li>Amy Klobuchar\r\n<li>Sheldon Whitehouse\r\n<li>Chuck Schumer\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nAnd it did finally pass, after numerous attempts to water down its NSA restrictions still farther.\r\n<p>\r\nNow here&#8217;s the rub:<!--more-->\r\n\r\n\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nThe White House issued a statement: &ldquo;Without passage of this bill, critical authorities that are appropriately reformed in this legislation could expire next summer. The Administration urges Congress to take action on this legislation now, since delay may subject these important national security authorities to brinksmanship and uncertainty. The Administration urges the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act and for the House to act expeditiously so that the President can sign legislation into law this year.&rdquo;\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nThe rub is that there&#8217;s no evidence any of those authorities are &#8220;critical&#8221;.\r\nNSA blanket surveillance <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2013\/10\/nsa-spying-did-not-result-in-one-stopped-terrorist-plot-and-the-government-actually-did-spy-on-the-bad-guys-before-911.html\">never caught a single terrorist, and NSA already could spy on actual bad guys before 911<\/a>.\r\nWe don&#8217;t need blanket surveillance of every message, voice, text, image, and video.\r\n<p>\r\nFurther, we never would have known about the extent of NSA&#8217;s overreach without Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers risking their freedom and maybe their lives.\r\n<p>\r\nAnother downside is that one Senator running for president\r\nwho was not an early sponsor of the bill (Rand Paul) is getting a lot of credit when many other hands got it this far. I agree with EFF&#8217;s summary.\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Cindy Cohn and Mark Jaycox, EFF, 2 June 2015, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/deeplinks\/2015\/05\/usa-freedom-act-passes-what-we-celebrate-what-we-mourn-and-where-we-go-here\">USA Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go From Here<\/a>,\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nThe Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the\r\nfirst time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have\r\napproved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the\r\nNational Security Agency&#8217;s surveillance powers. The weakening\r\namendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate\r\nMajority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to\r\nbelieve that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law.\r\nTechnology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA\r\nwill be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and\r\nboth the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and\r\naccountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<p>\r\nIt&#8217;s no secret that we wanted more. In the wake of the damning\r\nevidence of surveillance abuses disclosed by Edward Snowden,\r\nCongress had an opportunity to champion comprehensive surveillance\r\nreform and undertake a thorough investigation, like it did with the\r\nChurch Committee. Congress could have tried to completely end mass\r\nsurveillance and taken numerous other steps to rein in the NSA and\r\nFBI. This bill was the result of compromise and strong leadership by\r\nSens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee and Reps. Robert Goodlatte, Jim\r\nSensenbrenner, and John Conyers. It&#8217;s not the bill EFF would have\r\nwritten, and in light of the Second Circuit&#8217;s thoughtful opinion, we\r\nwithdrew our support from the bill in an effort to spur Congress to\r\nstrengthen some of its privacy protections and out of concern about\r\nlanguage added to the bill at the behest of the intelligence\r\ncommunity.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<p>\r\nEven so, we&#8217;re celebrating. We&#8217;re celebrating because, however\r\nsmall, this bill marks a day that some said could never\r\nhappen&mdash;a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced\r\nby Congress. And we&#8217;re hoping that this could be a turning point in\r\nthe fight to rein in the NSA.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nAnd there&#8217;s more upside:\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nThe USA Freedom Act shows that the digital rights community has leveled up. We\u2019ve gone from just killing bad bills to passing bills that protect people&#8217;s rights.\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nGlenn Greenwald, who released the first of the Snowden material, goes further:\r\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/2015\/6\/1\/glenn_greenwald_as_bulk_nsa_spying\">Glenn Greenwald: As Bulk NSA Spying Expires, Scare Tactics Can\u2019t Stop &ldquo;Sea Change&rdquo; on Surveillance<\/a>,\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nI think the greatest significance of the most recent event is more\r\nsymbolic than anything else, but it&#8217;s still actually quite \r\nsignificant. It&#8217;s really worth comparing the debate that we&#8217;re now\r\nhaving to what passed for a debate both in 2005 and 2011 over\r\nwhether to renew the PATRIOT Act. Remember, even after 9\/11, in the\r\nweeks after 9\/11 when the country was willing to give the government\r\nessentially anything that it asked for, the PATRIOT Act was regarded \r\nas this extremely radical piece of legislation, a very fundamental \r\ndeparture from how we always understood what the government could\r\nand couldn&#8217;t do when spying on us. And even in the wake of 9\/11, it \r\nwas regarded that way. And that&#8217;s the reason why, when it was\r\nenacted, embedded into some of these provisions was the idea that, \r\nlook, this is only supposed to be a temporary measure; it will\r\nautomatically go away, sunset, lapse every five&mdash;unless \r\nCongress every five years reauthorizes it. And in 2005, the Bush\r\nadministration demanded its renewal with no reforms. And in 2010,\r\nthe Obama administration did exactly the same thing: demanded\r\nrenewal of the PATRIOT Act with no reforms. And there was almost no\r\nopposition in either house of Congress, either political party, just\r\nsome token opposition from some libertarians, and Congress easily\r\nand overwhelmingly renewed the PATRIOT Act.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<p>\r\nThe fact that we&#8217;re now having this very contentious debate, where\r\nthe PATRIOT Act actually has lapsed, at least for a few days, and\r\nthat we&#8217;re going to have some kind of change in the law that we&#8217;re\r\ncalling reform underscores how significantly public opinion has\r\nchanged and the climate of the country has changed, the views of the\r\ntech community have changed, when it comes to how much surveillance\r\nwe&#8217;re willing to allow our government to engage in against us in the\r\nname of terrorism. I think that&#8217;s really the greatest significance,\r\nis the sea change that this represents.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote> \r\n<p>\r\nShakespeare, <em>The Tempest<\/em>,\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>Full fathom five thy father lies:\r\n<br>Of his bones are coral made:\r\n<br>Those are pearls that were his eyes:\r\n<br>Nothing of him that doth fade\r\n<br>But doth suffer a sea-change\r\n<br>Into something rich and strange.\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>\r\nPrivacy and freedom: that would be rich and strange.\r\nAnd now it can happen.\r\n<p>\r\n-jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Susanne Posel, The US Independent, November 18, 2014, Facebook, Google: USA Freedom Act Will Restore Customer Confidence, The Obama administration \u201cstrongly supports\u201d SB 2685, the USA Freedom Act (USFA) championed by Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) and co-sponsored by: Mike Lee Dick Durbin Dean Heller Al Franken Ted Cruz Richard [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[20,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-3rv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13237"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13240,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13237\/revisions\/13240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}