With clock ticking, lawmakers unveil Patriot Act bill

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced major reforms to the National Security Agency along with extensions to three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act. The negotiated legislation from House Judiciary Committee leaders -- including Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Sens Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Mike Lee (R-UT) -- would enact the largest changes to America’s intelligence powers in more than a decade. “As several intelligence-gathering programs are set to expire in a month, it is imperative that we reform these programs to protect Americans’ privacy while at the same time protecting our national security,” Chairman Goodlatte said in a joint statement along with the other House authors, Reps. John Conyers (D-MI), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the original author of the Patriot Act.

The new bill, called the USA Freedom Act, would effectively end the NSA’s phone records collection. Instead, it would require agency officials to obtain the records from private phone companies after securing a court order. It would also add a new panel of experts to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, allow US tech companies to disclose more about the information they are forced to hand over to the government and impose limits on the FBI’s use of “national security letters,” which is one way the government obtains companies’ records. Still, it could meet opposition both from hawks concerned about weakening American security and from civil libertarians who oppose reauthorizing the Patriot Act without more sweeping changes. The American Civil Liberties Union quickly came out against the bill, saying it does not go far enough. “The disclosures of the last two years make clear that we need wholesale reform. Congress should let Section 215 sunset as it’s scheduled to, and then it should turn to reforming the other surveillance authorities that have been used to justify bulk collection,” said Jameel Jaffer, the group’s deputy legal director.