NEW BILL TO REPEAL THE PATRIOT ACT, DISMANTLE POLICE STATE

Is it time for America to finally repeal the PATRIOT Act?

A bill introduced in March by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) would not only completely terminate the program and the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, but would also dramatically downsize the NSA’s domestic spying practices.

This sweeping legislation couldn’t be more timely, as controversial PATRIOT Act provisions, such as section 215, are slated for renewal on June 1.

The new bill, HR 1466, appropriately titled the Surveillance State Repeal Act of 2015, has garnered support across the political spectrum, and could effectively halt much of the broad domestic spying program, which was brought to light by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Several key areas are addressed, including the FISA Amendment Act of 2008 with its ubiquitous Section 702, Executive Order 12333, which made mass surveillance of Americans possible as it did not require warrants for probable cause, and the PATRIOT Act, which in the wake of 9/11, sought to clamp down severely on national security.

Dismantle The Police State, Repeal The PATRIOT Act

If enacted, the Surveillance State Repeal Act would completely abolish the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendment Act (FAA), would compel the Director of National Intelligence, the Dept of Justice, and the Attorney General to destroy information which had been gathered under all repealed acts, and would require future surveillance be based on warrants of probable cause.

Other provisions would prohibit the government from demanding technology companies to include back – doors for surveillance in their hardware, and would provide protections for whistle – blowers to safely expose legal and constitutional violations, abuses of power and funds, and threats to public safety or health.

To understand the importance of this proposal, it’s first necessary to examine the scope of the surveillance program, and its as – yet unchecked invasions into Americans’ private lives. Creative and loose interpretation of various legislations regulating government spying, has generated a piggybacking effect in which one law appears to justify the practical application of another, with the result being an insidious Orwellian Big Brother straight from the pages of 1984.

As a response to illegal and unconstitutional spying conducted by the NSA and CIA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was implemented in 1978, to more clearly define parameters of surveillance, with its own FISA Court overseeing those procedures.

Even though it was revealed that Pres. Bush had illegally bypassed the FISA Court entirely in order to further expand spying programs after 9/11, Congress did nothing to stop it. Then in 2008, the FISA Amendment Act was passed, and in a move which could best be described as pure irony, Section 702 of the amendment was used to legitimize still more spying.

What sets this apart from previous surveillance measures is that instead of pure metadata, the “content of communications” can be collected and retained, and can even be shared with other government agencies.

For instance, the DEA has used such information in the prosecution of drug cases, yet no requirement is in place for disclosing the source of evidence acquired through such surveillance. Not surprisingly, all of this is done without judicial or Congressional oversight.

Two programs of concern were implemented by the NSA, using the FAA’s Section 702. “Upstream” and “Prism” function conjointly as an information – collecting vacuum, sucking up the content and metadata from a slew of internet sources. Upstream is an unprecedented cable – tapping operation, gathering “communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.“

With its direct access to infrastructure, the program can capture almost all telephone and internet communications in the country. Whatever gaps do exist from Upstream’s trawling, Prism filled (the program was reportedly halted in 2011) through access to data from various internet companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo.

Yahoo resisted the government’s requests for user information, rightly calling the demand “unconstitutional and overbroad”, but the government threatened the company with a $250,000 per day fine for non-compliance.

The director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, Jameel Jaffer, said of the program,

“It’s shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this. The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications. This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That’s profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation.” 

After a long battle, much of which occurred secretly in court, Yahoo lost that battle, and had to fork over users’ information. 

Executive Order 12333, which outlines rules for spying on, basically, anyone inside the US as well as American persons, no matter their location, was truly the granddaddy of the Surveillance State as we know it today.

In it, the roles of the seventeen agencies which comprise the Intelligence Community, as well as what they can collect, when they can collect it, and how they can go about doing so, are defined under the current guidelines of the US Signals Intelligence Directive SP0018 (USSID 18).

Unfortunately, since these guidelines don’t require any warrants or oversight, and are fraught with loopholes allowing for generous interpretation, the EO has been used to justify a host of spy tactics from mapping Americans’ social networks to limiting Fourth Amendment protections.

One program given the green light under EO 12333 is Mystic, the NSA’s surveillance program which has the means to, alarmingly, record “100 percent of a foreign nation’s phone calls”, and does so without any Congressional or judicial oversight.

Though the official keyword is “foreign“, the program takes no precautions when Americans’ information is caught up in this massive information dragnet.

The “retrospective retrieval” (RETRO) portion of Mystic has a proven capability of intercepting and recording “every single” phone conversation in a given country, and retains them for 30 days, at which point new recordings replace the old.

In this manner, the NSA can retroactively review older phone conversations which might not have had any significance to the agency at the time of the recording, but which seem to have relevance in conjunction with newly acquired information. Essentially, this practice assumes the guilt of the whole.

By recording every communication without prejudice or verifiable reason, the NSA takes the stance that anyone has the potential to be a threat, therefore everyone should be seen as the enemy,  just in case they actually are.

Perhaps the most well-known facet of the domestic surveillance programs, the USA PATRIOT Act was implemented in the tidal wave of fear which followed 9/11.

Many of its parameters had already been proposed in a bill which failed in Congress a short time before 9/11, but in the heightened paranoia following that day, the desire to prevent terrorism clouded judgment, and changed the face of domestic spying in the country. The PATRIOT Act has been famously abused by authorities, who have used its powers for everything from gag – restrained records requests in the form of NSLs, to warrantless wiretaps, to “sneak and peak” searches.

National Security Letters (NSLs) are requests for records quite similar to a subpoena, and were used before 2001, but Section 505 of the PATRIOT Act expanded their reach, making them what the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) termed “most frightening and invasive.”

Issued by the FBI, NSLs can request information from providers like banks, phone and telecommunications companies, and ISPs, under the guise of the war on terror. Included with NSLs are gag orders, prohibiting the recipients from revealing to coworkers, friends, or family that the letters even exist.

With no oversight or review, the information requested can be used in monitoring ANY citizen’s financial, social, and internet practices, among other things. In 2013, Pres. Obama’s administration maintained that an average of 60 NSLs were being issued per day.

Section 213 from the PATRIOT Act grants permission for law enforcement to perform so-called “sneak and peak” warrants, which can be issued for any crime, including a misdemeanor.

A raid can be performed on the subject’s property, and though nothing can be legally seized, computers and possessions can be searched… and the subject does not have to be notified for months after the fact.

The premise for Section 213 and its secrecy, was to not “tip off terrorists” that a search had been undertaken, but these warrants have been wholly abused by the authorities and terrorism concerns only account for a fraction of a percent of their use. Most often, they are carried out in cases involving fraud or drugs.

According to reports of their usage, in 2013 there were a total of 11,129 sneak and peak warrants issued, of which a scant 51 were issued for terrorism; hardly the heavy – hit like its advocates had claimed it would be.

The “any tangible thing” clause of Section 215 is, indeed, as wholly broad and vague as it sounds. When mentioning the PATRIOT Act, this section is the part which usually comes to mind. Under the nebulous scope of “an authorized investigation… to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities“, the FBI can request records in FISA Court of just about anything for a person, from phone records, internet browsing history, banking records, driver’s license records, etc., and the court is obligated to grant the request.

Without having to prove a factual basis, the FBI simply has to maintain that the records are valid to an investigation. The icing on this cake is the gag order which prevents the recipient from telling anyone about the request, ever.

As rife with abuse as the PATRIOT Act has become, and as was warned by civil rights advocates before its passage, the government has renewed its controversial sections, each time they have come up for review.

Even the act’s author, Jim Sensenbrenner, has stated on record that the daily spying which the government conducts using PATRIOT Act authority, is an “abuse of the law“. Many legal challenges have attempted to bring it down to size, but with little success.

There are now two options to block further invasions by this pernicious legislation.

The first is the subject of this article, the Repeal of the Surveillance State Act, and the second is to allow the sunsetting sections, which are the most abused, to simply expire when they come up for review on June 1. Despite the now bipartisan support for HR 1466, analysts have given it a 0% chance of success. Grassroots efforts might increase its odds, so spreading word and contacting legislators is key.

Since it doesn’t stop with the PATRIOT Act, but instead addresses the multi-faceted imbroglio encompassing domestic spying, that bill could be the best hope Americans, and foreigners for that matter, have in their arsenal to remove the US government’s prying eyes from our private lives.

Perhaps the most glaring irony of all lies in the outcome of all this surveillance: only one, single case of preventing terrorism using these surveillance methods has ever occurred… and that was the case of a cab driver sending a small sum of money to a terrorist cell in Somalia, and had nothing whatsoever to do with a planned attack.

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin