These 12 Bills Are the NSA's Worst Nightmare

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Your guide to the pending legislation seeking to curb the government's vast surveillance powers.

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These pending bills seek to keep the NSA from sweeping up phone records en masse, take the rubber stamp away from the top-secret spy court that approves surveillance requests, and allow tech companies to tell the public more about the government requests they receive for user data, among other things. (At present, no lawmakers are actually trying to defund the NSA, although GOP Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan gave it a good shot.) Here's a guide to 12 pending bills that target US government spying (collected with help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation).


The Surveillance State Repeal Act (H.R. 2818)

Sponsor: Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.)

What it does: Unlike other pending bills that make careful revisions to existing surveillance laws, this one would completely repeal the PATRIOT Act and the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the statutes from which the NSA draws its broad spying powers. The bill also amends FISA—the 1978 law that governs the collection of foreign intelligence information—to clarify that "no information relating to a United States person may be acquired pursuant to this Act without a valid warrant based on probable cause" and it decrees that the government can't require tech companies to build backdoors in their security systems. In other words, this is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's worst nightmare.

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A Bill To Modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (S. 1182)

Sponsor(s): Sens. Mark Udall (D-Co.) and Wyden, Ron (D-Ore.)

What it does: Like the LIBERT-E Act, this legislation narrows the amount of information the government can collect when conducting a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, and how many people can be targeted. It would require the government to produce a "statement of facts" showing there are "reasonable grounds to believe" that the records being collected are relevant to an investigation and "pertain to an individual in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power." Unlike the LIBERT-E Act, this bill lacks the word "only," which could give the government more wiggle room.


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Cont'd: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/guide-bills-stop-nsa-spying