It is not an exaggeration to say Americans won the greatest victory for their privacy rights in nearly 30 years last week.
The USA Freedom Act ends mass surveillance of ordinary Americans under the Patriot Act and introduces some long-overdue transparency into our intelligence programs. And it passed Congress with overwhelming, bipartisan majorities in both the House and the Senate.
The National Security Agency’s program to collect the phone records of millions and millions of U.S. citizens was hatched in secret, depending on a secret interpretation of the law that Americans were not allowed to see. I have spent nearly a decade fighting mass surveillance, first working to bring this secret dragnet to light and then working to bring it to an end.
Only four years ago, I spoke on the Senate floor and sounded the alarm that the Patriot Act was being interpreted in a way that would astonish most Americans. Despite that warning and bipartisan support from allies like U.S. Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado and Kentucky U.S.Sen. Rand Paul, the Patriot Act was reauthorized that year by an overwhelming vote.
The end of this program stands as a true endorsement of the principle that Americans do not need to sacrifice their liberty to have security. Everybody who has supported our fight for surveillance reform over the last two years is responsible for our victory.
However, the fight to protect Americans’ constitutional rights against government overreach is far from over.
Plugging loopholes
I’m committed to plugging the backdoor search loophole that the government misuses to review Americans’ communications without a warrant. The Director of National Intelligence has told me the NSA, FBI and CIA are using a law designed to target foreign threats to scoop up and search for Americans’ emails and other communications without getting a warrant. This is nothing less than an end-run around the Constitution.
I want to beat back a proposal by FBI Director James Comey to require companies to weaken encryption and build security weaknesses into our electronic devices. He proposed creating magic keys that only the government could use to get access to information with a court order.
The problem is there are no magic keys. Weakening encryption inevitably creates security holes that hackers and foreign governments can exploit. That trade-off makes our information less safe and our country less secure.
Along with U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, I am fighting to make sure the government doesn’t turn our cell phones into tracking devices. Our bill, the GPS Act, would require the government to get a warrant before tracking Americans’ movements electronically.
And starting as soon as this week the Senate is expected to take up a cybersecurity bill that is really surveillance legislation by another name.
Threats to privacy
I strongly support going after hackers and taking strong steps to protect data held by companies and the government alike. But the bill proposed in the Senate would let companies provide large amounts of private consumer information to the government, and do far too little to protect that information against misuse.
That’s why 55 security experts, academics and technology groups wrote that the bill would do little to protect against hackers, while opening up a huge new avenue for the government to obtain Americans’ private information without a warrant.
Of course the threats to privacy that are already public are the easiest to fight. My time on the Intelligence Committee has taught me to always be vigilant for secret interpretations of the law and new surveillance techniques that even Congress does not know about.
Americans were rightly outraged when they learned that U.S. intelligence agencies relied on secret law to monitor millions of law-abiding U.S. citizens. The American people are now on high alert for new secret interpretations of the law, and intelligence agencies and the Justice Department would do well to keep that lesson in mind.
I always go back to a lesson my father taught me: the only way to protect our liberty is by asking tough questions. Our victory this week certainly gives me more ammunition to watchdog the government and intelligence agencies. Winning these battles, though, requires the support of Oregonians and Americans who are willing to fight for those liberties.
I want to thank everyone who stood up and said that liberty and security are not mutually exclusive.
As my friend Martin Heinrich said this week, Ben Franklin would be proud.
