Sen. Mike Lee: New bill would stop ‘illegal government spying’ on U.S. citizens
A bipartisan group of senators, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, unveiled new legislation Tuesday that would require the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities to have just cause before collecting Americans’ private electronic communications.
The Government Service Reform Act was introduced by Lee, a Republican, and Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. In the House, the sponsors are Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, and Rep. Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio.
The legislation, in addition to other privacy protections, would reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which gives the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies the power to surveil digital communications without a warrant. Technically the FBI and others are supposed to use Section 702 to collect data from foreigners, but communications by U.S. citizens are included in the large data sweeps and can be used by law enforcement officials under certain circumstances.
Intelligence and law enforcement officials say they need this authority to keep Americans safe, but Lee and others say they’ve abused this power.
Lee reiterated that position in a statement to the Deseret News when the bill was introduced Tuesday. He said the FISA Court and Director of National Intelligence confirm they’ve “conducted warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans’ private communications.”
“It is imperative that Congress enact real reforms to protect our civil liberties, including warrant requirements and statutory penalties for privacy violations, in exchange for reauthorizing Section 702. Our bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act stops illegal government spying and restores the Constitutional rights of all Americans,” he said.
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FISA is up for reauthorization this year, and members of Congress have said they won’t approve the legislation without changes to the bill. But the White House responded to this legislation — which would reauthorize a reformed FISA — by immediately trying to squash the bill.
A Biden administration official said the bill was “both the wrong fit for what we’re doing and operationally unworkable,” according to reporting by Axios.
In testimony submitted for a Senate hearing in June, intelligence officials said Section 702 “has proven indispensable to U.S. national security. Every day it helps protect Americans from a host of new and emerging threats — such as terrorist plots, weapons of mass destruction, malicious cyber activity, and hostile state behavior from China and Russia.”
But Lee, Wyden and other lawmakers said the government should not be collecting Americans’ private data without a warrant.
“If you want to protect Americans’ location data, if you want to protect their browsing data, if you want to protect their data that now is being purchased by data brokers, this is the place you’ve got to go,” Wyden said at a press conference Tuesday.
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Lee said he wondered if the White House official who was quoted was still thinking “in terms of a binary on-off switch” for FISA, which needs reauthorization before the end of the year.
“From the beginning these provisions have been rife with opportunities for constitutional mischief, and they’ve resulted in that even more than I think many of us could have imagined at the outset, even though many of us were suspicious from the beginning,” Lee said. “But that’s why it’s so important to fix this through legislation. And to not sit back and say, we’ve just got to get it reauthorized.”
“I think a lot of them will find it in their hearts to be able to compromise when they realize a clean reauthorization of 702 is not in the cards,” he said.
