RELATED STORY: USA Freedom Act Passes Senate

WASHINGTON — Industry and advocacy groups were generally pleased with passage of the USA Freedom Act on Tuesday (June 2), though for many it was viewed as a step in an ongoing process.

For example, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute (OTI) called it the first major victory in an ongoing battle for surveillance reform.

“The end of bulk collection under the USA Patriot Act is just the beginning — not the end — of reform," OTI policy director Kevin Bankston said. "We will need to be vigilant to ensure that the reforms in USA Freedom are implemented faithfully, using the transparency and accountability tools created by the bill to make sure that the new bans on bulk collection are working. Congress must also quickly turn its attention to the important work of ending mass surveillance and warrantless searches of Americans’ online activities under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act

Computer & Communications Industry Association president Ed Black said: "Today’s vote is a tangible victory for citizens around the world, and a step toward restoring trust in the U.S. government and the ability of lawmakers to do what is right in the face of tremendous political pressure. It also begins the process of rebuilding the confidence of Internet users worldwide in American providers of digital services.

“The USA Freedom Act is not a complete panacea, and serves only as the first step in what will prove to be a lengthy and difficult process to reform the mass surveillance programs in use by the U.S. government.  However, it does much to end the bulk collection of Americans' data across a number of authorities, provides for significant privacy reporting by the private sector, the intelligence community, and secret FISA court, and should lead to improved oversight of surveillance programs by our citizens," Black added.

The bill sets a six-month transition for the reforms, so in the interim the bulk collection will continue.

Tech Freedom, a libertarian-leaning nonprofit advocacy group, said it saw the USA Freedom Act’s passage as a big win and an end to "all" bulk collection of phone records.  “By passing the USA Freedom Act, the Senate has restored legitimate intelligence capabilities while putting an end to needless domestic dragnet data collection,” Tech Freedom president Berin Szoka said. “While the Section 215 sunset was a symbolic victory for privacy, it would have allowed bulk collection to continue under other authorities, such as the FISA pen/trap statute and National Security Letters.”

Software makers were celebrating.

“This is a tremendous accomplishment and an important day for the U.S. technology industry," Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) vice president for public policy Mark MacCarthy said. "This legislation will both safeguard our country and ensure that individual privacy protections are upheld. For more than two years, SIIA and other tech leaders have called for reform of the U.S. surveillance system as an essential part of ensuring America’s continued economic leadership. Because it will restore international trust in American businesses, sensible surveillance reform is not only a security issue, but is also an important economic concern.

The American Civil Liberties Union was celebrating, if only a partial victory.

“The passage of the USA Freedom Act is a milestone. This is the most important surveillance reform bill since 1978, and its passage is an indication that Americans are no longer willing to give the intelligence agencies a blank check," ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said. "It’s a testament to the significance of the Snowden disclosures and also to the hard work of many principled legislators on both sides of the aisle."

"Still, no one should mistake this bill for comprehensive reform. The bill leaves many of the government’s most intrusive and overbroad surveillance powers untouched, and it makes only very modest adjustments to disclosure and transparency requirements."

But not everyone was applauding.

Tough Patriot Act critic CREDO Mobile, a San Francisco-based wireless provider that uses its profits to fund progressive causes, said it saw things a lot differently.

“The Senate just voted to create sweeping new authorities for the government to conduct unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans," it said in a statement. "From now on, every time the government violates our privacy without a warrant by sweeping up highly-sensitive medical, educational, financial, email and telephone records, the responsibility will rest squarely on the shoulders of the senators who voted today to recreate expired Patriot Act authorities.”

Attorney General Loretta Lynch put in a plug for the USA Freedom Act Wednesday (May 27) on her way to announcing indictments against executives involved with FIFA.

Senators are currently trying to find some common ground on the bill, which would at least limit -- some say eliminate -- indiscriminate metadata collection by the NSA, a program revealed by agency leaker Edward Snowden.

The House passed the bill, but the Senate failed to bring it up for an up or down vote and has plans for one more try in a Sunday, May 31, session before the bulk collection authority -- under the Patriot Act -- expires June 1.

"I am deeply committed to ensuring that this nation protects the civil liberties of every American while also keeping our country safe and secure," she said. "Unfortunately, some of the vital and uncontroversial tools we use to combat terrorism and crime are scheduled to shut down on Sunday."

Privacy activists opposed to the bill and the collection would take issue with the term "uncontroversial.”

"The House of Representatives has passed a bipartisan bill, called the USA Freedom Act, that would extend these tools while addressing important and valid concerns about other aspects of the government’s ability to protect data – but without action from the U.S. Senate, we will experience a serious lapse in our ability to protect the American people," Lynch said. "I join the President in urging the U.S. Senate to work through the current recess in order to make sure that we can continue to appropriately safeguard this country and protect its citizens."

The White House has received a 90-day reauthorization of the NSA's telephone metadata collection program. In the wake of the Eric Snowden leaks about the program, the President made some changes in how the data could be used, but said that to no longer collect the data in bulk would require a change in the law.

The White House sought and received the reauthorization Dec. 4. It expires Feb. 27, which sets a new deadline for a new Congress to pass a bill.

The old Congress failed to agree on a bill, the USA Freedom Act, that would have revamped the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). There are critics of the bill who say it goes too far, and who say it does not go far enough, in protecting the public's privacy and reigning in bulk collection.

Both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence said earlier this year that the bill was a reasonable compromise between the need to collect info to prevent terrorism and the need to protect privacy and civil liberties. It was those two offices that, in a joint statement, said the administration was seeking the 90-day extension given that Congress failed to pass the bill.

Read more at B&C here. 

A coalition of more than 40 groups, including New America's Open Technology Institute, the ACLU, and the American Library Association, has asked the Senate to make passing the latest version of the USA Freedom Act (S. 2685) a priority when it returns to Washington Monday (Sept. 8), and without adding any amendments to "weaken" it.

That is the bill that reforms government surveillance of public communications, including by increasing transparency and public reporting. It is meant to rein in the kind of bulk data collection by government agencies exposed by leaker Edward Snowden, and would affect telco and cable companies.

"S. 2685 in its current form would provide significant transparency and privacy safeguards while preserving the tools intelligence agencies need to protect national security," the groups said. "But they said their consensus support would be "severely disrupted" if mandatory data retention requirements were added. Currently, communications companies only have to retain records for the length of time they would normally keep them in the course of business.

Supporters of longer data-retention mandates argue that will prevent potentially important information from slipping through the net, but the groups say they pose" significant threats not only to privacy and civil liberties, but also to data security, as stories of data breaches at major corporations like Target, Neiman Marcus, UPS, and major banks demonstrate." Obviously, the more data that can be held for legal government searches, the more there is available for illegal ones.

More than three dozen groups opposing bulk data collection have told the Senate it needs to strengthen the USA Freedom Act that passed the House last month.

They argue that the House compromise version of the bill to end bulk collection of data by the NSA and other government agencies was too "watered down" and could still allow for far too much collection of data. Those groups, who definitely support ending bulk collection, were unable to support the compromise bill.

In a letter to Senate leaders this week (http://www.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/program_pages/attac...), the groups, which included New America's Open Technology Institute (OTI), Free Press and the ACLU, said that the Senate version needs to be improved, first and foremost by effectively banning bulk collection.

They argue that it could still allow for what amounts to data dragnets. "The bill’s overbroad and open-ended definition of “specific selection term” could abusively be read to authorize collection of the records of thousands or millions of innocent Americans," they argue. "For example, it could conceivably allow the use of a selection term as broad as a zip code, all of the gmail.com Internet domain, or all of Verizon’s premises." Unless the definition is narrowed, they say, they can't support the bill.

The Administration has signaled to the Hill that it would be willing to work on a new definition, but thinks the current one is acceptable.

The groups also want stronger provisions authorizing service providers to publish basic information about the national security requests they receive, and requiring the government to be similarly transparent. They also warn against adding requirements for ISPs to create any new records for the government to access, or store records any longer than they would in the ordinary course of business.

"We will have to oppose USA Freedom if the Senate fails to substantially strengthen the bill to better protect our rights against NSA overreach,” said OTI  Policy Director Kevin Bankston. “We hope that this unified message will bolster the resolve of our allies in the Senate and improve the chances of Congress quickly passing a strong bill that will effectively rein in the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ private data.”

Over in the House, supporters of stronger prohibitions on data collection are trying amend a must-pass defense appropriations bill with surveillance reforms that would defund warrantless searches or efforts to get companies to insert "security vulnerabilities" into their networks to make surveillance easier.