OBAMA SCREWS UP EFFORTS TO CONTROL NSA

USA Freedom Act Loses Backing of Privacy Advocates

By Spencer Ackerman, Guardian UK

21 May 14

• Facebook, Google and others warn of 'unacceptable loopholes'


• Bill's passage expected in House even after 11th-hour changes

 landmark surveillance bill, likely to pass the US House of Representatives on Thursday, is hemorrhaging support from the civil libertarians and privacy advocates who were its champions from the start.

Major revisions to the USA Freedom Act have stripped away privacy protections and transparency requirements while expanding the potential pool of data the National Security Agency can collect, all in a bill cast as banning bulk collection of domestic phone records. As the bill nears a vote on the House floor, expected Thursday, there has been a wave of denunciations.

“It does not deserve the name ‘USA Freedom Act’ any more than the ‘Patriot Act’ merits its moniker,” wrote four former NSA whistleblowers and their old ally on the House intelligence committee staff.

The former NSA officials – Thomas Drake, William Binney, Edward Loomis and J Kirk Wiebe – and former congressional staffer Diane Roark denounced 11th-hour changes to the Freedom Act as resulting in “a very weak” bill.

“Much legislation has been exploited and interpreted by the administration as permitting activities that Congress never intended,” they wrote in a letter Wednesday to Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat.

Lofgren told the Guardian last week that she intended to offer amendments to the Freedom Act, which cleared the House intelligence and judiciary committees two weeks ago, adding encryption protections and providing greater leeway to companies seeking to disclose surveillance orders for their customers’ data.

But Lofgren warned on the House floor Wednesday that none of her amendments were put into order by the powerful House rules committee, which released a new version of the Freedom Act on Tuesday night that reflected substantial changes made at the insistence of the Obama administration, the NSA and the office of the director of national intelligence.

Most significantly, the version emerging from the rules committee expanded the definition of a “specific selection term,” the root thing – formerly defined as information that “uniquely describe[s] a person, entity, or account” – the government must present to a judge, with suspicion of connection of terrorism or espionage, in order to collect data under the bill.

The new definition is “a discrete term, such as” a person, entity, account, “address or device”. That revision has spurred privacy advocates and even major technology companies to doubt that the bill will actually ban the mass collection of Americans’ data, its ostensible purpose.

A coalition of the US’s largest technology companies – including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, AOL, Dropbox, Twitter, Yahoo and LinkedIn – warned that definition created an “unacceptable loophole that could enable the bulk collection of internet users' data”.

The coalition, which spurred attention in Washington with a December statement of principles for surveillance reform, announced it would not support the USA Freedom Act.

As recently as April, the Freedom Act looked all but dead, a casualty of unstated opposition from House leadership of both parties and the Obama administration, which had frustrated the bill’s backers by not offering any guidance on it. The bill, bottled up in the judiciary committee, had support of nearly 150 legislators, and was the most viable legislative vehicle to restrict government surveillance since 9/11.

A move by NSA allies on Capitol Hill to push a rival bill backfired, however, resulting in the bill moving out of committee. But a redoubled effort by the NSA’s backers saw a compromise pass – one that diluted many of the Freedom Act’s privacy protections, such as a prohibition on the NSA searching through its communications content databases for Americans’ identifying information, in exchange for becoming a consensus bill.

Several civil libertarian organisations swallowed the compromises as worth passing a bill that would still rein in the NSA. But after administration and intelligence lawyers, with the aid of the House leadership, recast the bill during marathon sessions over last week’s congressional recess, those groups pulled away.

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation cannot support a bill that doesn't achieve the goal of ending mass spying,” the organisation stated. The group and several others vowed to strengthen the version of the bill that the Senate judiciary committee intends to consider in the summer.

If there was a silver lining for civil libertarians on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, it was a decision by the House science and technology committee to remove a provision from a different piece of legislation requiring the NSA to be consulted on encryption standards – standards that the Guardian, relying on leaks from Edward Snowden, revealed the NSA secretly weakens.

“Allowing the NSA to consult on cryptographic standards is like consulting with a shoplifter on the design of your store alarm system,” Amie Stepanovich of the digital-rights group Access said in a statement.

Practically the only entity that lent its support to the USA Freedom Act on Wednesday was the White House.

“The administration applauds and appreciates the strong bipartisan effort that led to the formulation of this bill, which heeds the president's call on this important issue,” the White House office of management and budget said in a statement.