A controversial amendment that would expand the FBI’s surveillance power was narrowly defeated in the Senate Wednesday.
The final tally was 58 to 38, two votes shy of the 60 needed for the amendment to move forward. The issue will likely surface again soon, however, as Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., immediately filed for a motion to reconsider the amendment.
The amendment — lumped on last-minute to a criminal justice funding bill — would have expanded the scope of information the FBI can collect by sending technology and Internet companies what’s known as a national security letter—without getting any kind of court approval first.
The FBI would be able to access information about suspects’ online behavior including what websites someone visits and for how long, IP address, social media activity, email headers, and more.
Companies can’t talk about the requests because they come with a gag order. Only a handful of national security letters have been made public in the decades since the FBI started issuing them.
Privacy advocates and technology companies have protested the amendment as an intrusion on Fourth Amendment protections on sensitive personal information.
“The country wants policies that promote safety and liberty,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on Wednesday. “Increasingly we’re getting policies that don’t do much of either.”
He pointed out that the USA Freedom Act, in a section he authored, would allow the FBI to get the records it seeks in an emergency immediately and seek judicial approval afterwards.
Advocates like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the amendment’s sponsor, insist the FBI needs more power to combat “radicalization” on the Internet. “Every law enforcement agency in American supports this,” he insisted.
The vote comes shortly after Republican senators rallied around the recent tragedy at a night club in Orlando to push for expanded surveillance powers. Though the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., admitted on the floor before the vote that the amendment would not have prevented the mass shooting in Orlando, or the attacks in San Bernardino in December of last year.
Burr repeated FBI Director James Comey’s assertion that the expansion being discussed is really just fixing a “typo” in the law—because the FBI used to regularly seek those records before one company, whose identify remains unknown, “bucked the system” as Burr put it, and refused to hand them over because the language of the law was confusing.
In fact, the FBI has been trying to expand the power of its national security letters since 2008, when the George W. Bush Department of Justice interpreted those powers more narrowly than the FBI liked.
The FBI has also continued to ask for additional records until at least 2013 despite the DOJ’s advice, exceeding its authorities, as The Intercept reported.
Fix a typo! Enough bullshit! Thanks for providing the proper context.
The power’s that be are constructing a type of dystopian society that we may not have ever fully seen in full bloom before. Their intense use of force, of the military and military technology, of the police and extreme social repression and death, shows exactly how traumatic what they are creating will be for the person on the street. Their open and direct hate of real journalism, and their love of secrecy, their love of mass incarceration and torture, and their total hate of the ‘Rule of Democratic Law’ shows beyond a shadow of a doubt what they are planning. And it will resemble what we have seen in other nations, like Mexico recently, where the police and the military have become the active enemies of the citizens they once protected from exactly what they are now doing to them. It is time for concerted citizen actions that will not end until we have won back our democracy from these monsters!
Nice piece Jenna, thank goodness they didn’t get this in.
Please let us know before the next vote (and what the bill is) so we can scream at our Senators and maybe foil this.
Quit the act.
The Patriot Act got us into this.
Request representatives eliminate Freedom Act now.
Where can I find the roll call for this? Do you have a link ?
It would be informative to know which Dems sided with the rightwing!
Senators in favor: 46 Republicans, 11 Democrats (Casey, Heitkamp, Klobuchar, Manchin, McCaskill, MIkulski, Nelson, Reed, Reid, Warner, Whitehouse); 1 Independent (King).
Senators against: 30 Democrats, 8 Republicans (Daines, Gardner, Heller, Lee, McConnell*, Murkowski, Paul), 1 Independent (Sanders). *McConnell changed his vote in order to offer a motion to reconsider.
Senators not voting: 3 Democrats (Donnelly, Feinstein, Menendez) and 1 Republican (Crapo).
There is a way to stop them.
A public list of those who should have their information hacked and leaked.
No one would want to be on such a list.
The internet is the only thing broader and more powerful than they are.
Please hack and leak. It’s the only way to put them in check.
No. That’s not the way to do it. That’s incitement, and not only is it bordering on illegal, but it’s also counterproductive unless your goal is to give TPTB even more reason and justification to further erode our rights and liberties.
If you’re powerful and see gross atrocities in the government, by all means, whistleblow — it’s probably one’s moral and ethical responsibility to do so (and definitely is if it’s causing harm). Or to borrow a phrase back: If you see something say something.
But two wrongs (or even more wrongs) never ever make a right. They just make a mob mentality and generally lead to even more oversteps and even more fascistic laws.
Can we have a vote whether to Leave or Remain in this Orwellian National Security State? Unfortunately, The Intercept itself would call me a xenophobe for wanting to Leave.
Isn’t Britain more pro-surveillance than the rest of the EU?