Senate’s indecision on Patriot Act is harmful; eliminate Section 215

If the Patriot Act and the NSA haven’t been on your mind, there’s probably still a good chance you’re on theirs (so to speak), or at least your calls are. The NSA has been registering to-and-from information from our phone calls since the Patriot Act was instituted after 9/11. But this is old information.

What’s new is the U.S. Senate’s scrambling to determine whether or not to keep alive the more darker spying tools in the Act, set to expire late Sunday, at midnight, if Congress fails to reauthorize it.

In recent days, there’s been huge debate across party lines, being kicked off by the filibuster against reauthorization by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, where he was aided Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat.

The ball is in the Senate’s court right now, since it earlier rejected by three votes the “USA Freedom Act,” a relatively moderate replacement bill that passed in the House of Representatives, 338-88.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, has proposed a bill that is much less of a compromise than the Freedom Act, which would give the NSA another two years to wind down its data collection. It’s not expected to pass. The Senate isn’t expected to reconvene until 4 pm Sunday. In short, at this late point an attempt to pass anything other than the USA Freedom Act would result in a lapse of the NSA’s phone-monitoring program.

Currently, three Republican lawmakers who voted against the bill face tough odds for re-election- in their next races, and Sen. Mike Enzi,  R-Wyoming, wasn’t present during the vote on the Freedom Act; these senators’ votes are unpredictable at the moment.

The Advocate staff’s main problem with the Patriot Act is a freedom of speech issue. If our speech is truly free, then citizens should be allowed to aim or restrict their speech to whomever they choose, and the government isn’t exempt from that.

Just because a lot of our information is now virtual, that doesn’t make it any less private. Imagine if this happened in the physical world: The NSA would just casually waltz into your home and start rooting through your desk, and personal letters.

“Whoa there, pal, calm down… If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

It sounds kind of like a bad joke now, huh?

We understand the opposition, though. To Patriot Act supporters, protecting our national interest is important, and a lot of those surveillance issues should be confidential for the time being. The indicator of the NSA’s success then becomes how many terror attacks or other crimes have been thwarted, versus how much data has been collected that was intended by all of us to remain private.

The answer? Literally, one threat was foiled, according to deputy NSA Director John Inglis (after having the NSA’s original claim of 54 plots uncovered and stopped fact-checked, and then revised to four plots, and then again to one).

Only one plot has been prevented, and Inglis still didn’t disclose any details as to how this happened, or what the plot was.

Then there are further Constitutional issues: Namely, is this call-monitoring unreasonable search and seizure? The Advocate believes, by definition, yes, it is. Information is being taken with no prior cause, legally speaking. This stems from another issue – the NSA’s interpretation of Section 15 of the Patriot Act, which in a nutshell says that the NSA can collect relevant business data. This led to the mass collection of phone data since the NSA views it as business information, since it’s through a telephone provider, and that it’s relevant since it helped solve one case.

Considering all this, the Advocate can’t in good conscious support the USA Freedom Act, or the remaining sections of the Patriot Act, and believe instead it should be allowed to expire, with nothing to amend or encourage the continuity of anything similar to our current data-collection fiasco.