Sen. Franken Promotes Surveillance Bill At Hill Hearing

Some Democratic legislators and industry players, notably Google, were in agreement that the US government needs to reestablish the trust of the public and international community following the recent revelations about data collection in the name of national security and law enforcement. At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, the Surveillance Transparency Act, introduced by Subcommittee Chairman Al Franken (D-MN) and Sen. Dean Heller (R- NV), was billed by its supporters as a good first step.

At issue, said Google and others, was not only loss of privacy, but the financial hit from a public grown wary of the security -- or more to the point, insecurity -- of cloud storage. They argued that the bill's provisions requiring a more detailed accounting of who and how many were being tracked than the government was so far willing to offer up was crucial to regaining -- or establishing -- public trust. Sen. Franken said transparency about the National Security Agency was needed so the public could decide whether or not that was appropriate. That was seconded by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), a bill co-sponsor, who said "what you don't know can hurt you." He said the bill would provide the kind of transparency that can clear up misinformation and mistrust that lessens our credibility at home and abroad. One of the bill's provisions is to require the government to come up with an approximate figure of how many US citizens have been surveilled -- since that surveillance is supposed to be targeted at foreign, not domestic, communications. Sen. Franken suggested that the bill was urgently necessary, maintaining that the Obama Administration had taken "good steps in good faith," that that those voluntary measures were too little and not permanent.