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Senate Blocks Bill on N.S.A. Collection of Phone Records


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senate-nsa-surveillance.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1NY Times:

JENNIFER STEINHAUER

MAY 23, 2015

 

WASHINGTON — After vigorous debate and intense last-minute pressure by Republican leaders, the Senate on Saturday rejected legislation that would end the federal government’s bulk collection of phone records.

 

With the death of that measure — passed overwhelmingly in the House earlier this month — senators then scrambled to hastily pass a short-term measure to keep the program from going dark when it expires June 1 but failed. The disarray in Congress appeared to significantly increase the chances that the government will lose systematic access to newly created calling records by Americans, at least temporarily, after June 1.

 

“This is a high-threat period,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who was felled in his efforts to extend the program even for a few days by the junior senator for his home state, Rand Paul.

 

The Senate will reconvene on May 31 to try again. But any extension is far from certain to get approval from the House, which is in recess until June 1, with at least one member threatening to block it.

 

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Why National-Security Republicans Lost the Patriot Act Debate

Andrew C. McCarthy

May 23, 2015

 

The NSA doesn’t even know your name.

 

But you probably don’t know that. It is amazing how little the public has learned from the debate the national-security Right has lost — not is losing but has lost — over the National Security Agency’s “metadata” program.

 

The information the NSA has collected in bulk from telecommunication-service providers does not include the names of telephone subscribers. They don’t know who you are. It does not include addresses. They don’t know where you are.

 

Most people still do not know this, which reflects the power of the “domestic spying” canard peddled by Rand Paul’s anti-government extremists and Baby-Boom lefties who apparently still think it’s 1974. The latter camp includes a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit federal appeals court in New York, whose ruling that the NSA program is illegal begins with this astonishing claim: “In the early 1970s, in a climate not altogether unlike today’s, the intelligence-gathering and surveillance activities of the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA came under public scrutiny.”

 

EDITORIAL: Save the Patriot Act, Don’t Neuter It

 

Seriously? A program that creates a database that does not contain personal identifying information, and that can be accessed only under a statutory process overseen by a special court that Congress established precisely in response to the Seventies spy scandals, is reminiscent of the black-bag tactics that marked those scandals?

 

As I’ve discussed before, and as National Review’s editors have acknowledged, there is a perfectly reasonable argument that the NSA program is illegal. Not that it is unconstitutional, for the Supreme Court has long held that data about phone calls (as opposed to the content of the calls) have no Fourth Amendment protection; but that it may violate the governing statute, Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That is, one could conclude that, in permitting the NSA to collect millions of phone records, the aforementioned special court (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – or FISA — Court) unreasonably stretched the governing statute’s concept of what records count as “relevant” to terrorism investigations.

 

RELATED: NSA Data Collection: Necessary, or Unconstitutional?

 

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The Comments are (as always) very enlightening....wallbash.gif

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