Patriot Act setback
Our view: Senate appears headed in the right direction on NSA surveillance
The government’s authority to spy on the private phone calls of millions of Americans without their knowledge or consent expired at midnight Sunday, and for first time since the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, citizens won’t have the specter of “Big Brother” looking over their shoulders to record their every move. But don’t get too comfortable; the respite is likely to be only temporary.
For weeks, the Senate has been stalled over legislation to reauthorize the Patriot Act, which gives the National Security Agency the legal authority to conduct its secret bulk data collection program as well as other clandestine activities intended to help the government to nip potential terrorist threats in the bud. The House approved legislation reauthorizing the NSA program, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell objected to a provision in it that would have required the agency to obtain the so-called “metadata” on calls — the dates, times, durations and numbers dialed — from the telephone companies rather than collect the information itself, and to get a court order whenever it wanted to search the phone companies’ archives.
Mr. McConnell insisted the change would damage the NSA’s ability to uncover terrorist plots and proposed his own bill, which would have simply extended the original law without amendments. But that proved unacceptable to a bipartisan Senate coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarian conservatives that included GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul. Mr. Paul vowed to filibuster both Mr. McConnell’s bill and the USA Freedom Act passed by the House in order to shut down the NSA program altogether. On Sunday, he made good on that threat, thus preventing the Senate taking action on either measure before the Patriot Act expired June 1.
As recently as last week, there appeared to be senators in both parties willing to vote for a straight reauthorization of the Patriot Act, as Mr. McConnell wanted. However, that would have required the House to revisit the issue as well, and Speaker John Boehner seemed in no mood to make changes to the legislation his chamber had already passed. As last month’s deadline loomed, Mr. McConnell evidently realized that the only hope of preventing the act from expiring altogether was to adopt the House-passed bill with minor amendments. But even that proved impossible after Mr. Paul carried out his filibuster threat.
Under Senate rules, today is the first time the chamber can take up the matter again, and it appears likely senators are resigned to accepting the House-approved legislation rather than prolong the shutdown of the NSA programs. Meanwhile, Mr. Paul, who remains adamant that the surveillance program violates the Constitution’s protections against unlawful searches and seizures, is being hailed by his conservative supporters for standing up against governmental overreaching into citizens’ private lives.
It’s somewhat ironic that Mr. Paul, whose filibuster neatly served his political purposes as a presidential candidate, has succeeded mostly in revealing the division in his party between its libertarian and national security wings. There is virtually no doubt the NSA surveillance programs will eventually be reauthorized in some form, no matter what he does — and he is doubtless perfectly aware of that fact. But his supporters won’t blame him nearly as much for losing this battle as they would have if he had failed to put up a fight. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how Mr. McConnell doesn’t come out of this looking weakened by his inability to get senators to toe the line he favored and for his ineptitude in allowing the Patriot Act to expire, if only briefly.
In the long run, however, this Washington tempest in a teapot signals a broader turn in public opinion about the NSA’s massive surveillance program since its existence was first revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. Americans today are more likely to view the government’s intrusions into their private lives a lot less sympathetically than they were 14 years ago in the panic after the Sept. 11 attacks. The imbroglio over the extension of the Patriot Act should be seen as attempt to begin curtailing the government’s power to snoop on its citizens whenever and for whatever reason it chooses. That’s a good first step toward restoring the legal protections citizens of a democracy enjoy, and it shouldn’t be the last.