A divided Congress should come together for federal surveillance reform

On Thursday, NSA Director and Army Gen. Paul Nakasone spoke at a virtual panel discussion presented by the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to urge the renewal of “one of the U.S. government’s most important intelligence authorities.” He’s referring to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA authorizes the NSA to engage in secret surveillance to keep track of potential foreign threats, overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is supposed to make sure that Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless snooping are honored.

Or that’s the ideal, anyway. In reality, particularly in the wake of 9/11, the NSA has repeatedly been caught secretly collecting and tracking far more domestic data than Americans had been told. Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT ACT, passed in 2001, also fueled the secret collection of Americans’ online communications and phone records. The extent of the surveillance was partly exposed by Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013, and since then there’s been significant political debate over and some modest reforms of these authorities to better protect Americans’ data privacy. …

And so, then, the current lack of trust in government and the polarized relationship between the two parties actually makes the prospect of further reforms more possible than it might have been before. Because political party control over both the House and Senate is so narrow, that bipartisan group demanding reform has more power to stop renewal if reforms don’t happen. Negotiation may be necessary.