Former NSA workers Thomas Drake, left, and William Binney, right, said Monday that Congress should repeal the entire Patriot Act and other post-9/11 surveillance laws. Getty Images
Three former National Security Agency officials who oppose U.S. mass surveillance programs say they also oppose the USA Freedom Act, a reform package about to be reintroduced in Congress.
The bill's final wording likely will be unveiled this week, kicking off an intense debate before the June 1 expiration of three surveillance provisions – most notably Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the Bush and Obama administrations used to justify the bulk collection of U.S. call records.
The Freedom Act would reauthorize the expiring provisions but prohibit bulk record collection under Section 215. Capitol Hill staffers working on the bill believe it would better protect privacy than a similar bill that failed last year.
The three less-famous forerunners of whistleblower Edward Snowden, however, tell U.S. News the bill won’t meaningfully curb NSA activities and recommend returning to a pre-9/11 legal framework, which they say would keep the U.S. safe if authorities share intelligence.
They prefer the long-shot Surveillance State Repeal Act, which would repeal the entire Patriot Act and later supplements, add whistleblower protections and attempt to rein in surveillance authorized by Executive Order 12333.
Former NSA crypto-mathematician William Binney, who worked three decades at the agency, says the Freedom Act – widely seen as having the best chance of any surveillance-limiting proposal – “won’t do anything” if it passes.
“Why do you think NSA [and other intelligence agencies] support it?” he says.
Binney says the bill’s limitation of two “hops” on records the government could require companies to produce – meaning records of a target's communications and records of communications made by the target's contacts – can yield billions of people’s records.
Binney, who left the agency in 2001 and – alongside fellow whistleblowers Kirk Wiebe and Thomas Drake – sought to raise alarms about wasteful spending through official channels before later alerting the public to privacy intrusions, plans to lobby members of Congress to take more drastic action.
Drake, a former NSA senior executive prosecuted unsuccessfully under the Espionage Act before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor in 2011, calls the bill the “Free-dumb Act 2.0,” and says he sees it as a ploy by government officials “to keep the status quo in place.”
Drake says he has no hope that meaningful surveillance reform will pass Congress this year, and expects another multiyear reauthorization of expiring provisions.
He also says the fixation on the call record program in public debate is unfortunate, because NSA Internet surveillance is far broader and more invasive. “It’s a shiny, shiny bright spot, [but] there’s a whole lot more being collected,” he says, including a “staggering” amount of American communications.
Drake believes support from the Obama administration for the Freedom Act is motivated in part by a desire to hobble lawsuits against the call record program, three of which are pending with appeals courts and may lay the groundwork for a major Supreme Court privacy ruling.
“That’s really one of their motives,” he says, noting the Supreme Court recently has expanded electronic privacy protections, ruling in 2012 that police need warrants for GPS tracking and last year that police generally need warrants to search arrested people's cellphones.
Lawsuits against the NSA phone record program likely would be dismissed if legislation ends the collection, legal experts say. If President Barack Obama were to end the bulk collection program – which he says he supports terminating – by presidential order, the lawsuits would have a better shot at proceeding.
Still, there's no guarantee the Freedom Act will pass. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is sponsoring legislation that would renew the three provisions without modification, and near-unanimity among Republican senators – who now hold a greater majority – doomed the bill in the upper chamber last year.
Wiebe, formerly a senior analyst at the NSA, says the anticipated Freedom Act likely will be “more of the same” and is “not going to change anything” in a meaningful way. Like Drake, he has no hope for meaningful reform and doesn’t believe efforts to lobby Congress would work.
“We’ve tried,” he says. “It makes no difference.” He believes well-funded government contractors and powerful, “co-opted” lawmakers who lead key committees make up a virtually unstoppable surveillance-industrial complex.
Steven Nelson is a reporter at U.S. News & World Report. You can follow him on Twitter or reach him at snelson@usnews.com.
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