Congress to vote on Section 215 of the Patriot Act

Section 215 of the Patriot Act is what allowed the NSA to record and store American’s telephone records and all of the relevant metadata for these records such as who called who, when, and for how long. Section 215 is extremely controversial as it was the subject of the very first Snowden leak that brought into light some of the data collection programs that the NSA are involved in. As seen in the Frontline documentary United States of Secrecy the government denied the severity of this program, claiming that it only captured the telephone records of “known terrorists”. This was obviously false, and the program continued to gather the records of all Americans.

Section 215 is also responsible for the ability for the FBI to apply for “an order to produce materials that assist in an investigation undertaken to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” These orders are similar to the National Security Letters (NSLs) that were described in the documentary.

The orders explicitly request “tangible things” such as books, records, documents, etc.  that is held by the person or company receiving the letter.  These orders contain built-in gag orders on them such that you cannot tell anybody that you have received one of these letters:  "No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section.” These orders can contain massive amounts of information: “To give you a sense of the scale: the one FISA order published by the Guardian from the Snowden trove compelled Verizon to hand over every phone record that it had on all its millions of customers. Every single one.” These orders are extremely powerful considering the sheer amount of information that the FBI is able to obtain with them.

On June 1^st, Congress will be forced to decide if Section 215 should remain active. Unless both houses of congress affirmatively vote for it to be reauthorized, it will expire and will no longer be in effect.

The question that immediately comes to mind when hearing about this is the following: Will this actually change anything?

The programs and practices of the United States government are extremely secretive and confidential. This is only amplified when it comes to national security and information/data collection to stop potential terrorist attacks. Should Congress vote against the reactivation of Section 215, how are we to know that these programs will actually shut down and cease to exist? I don’t remember the law ever slowing down the NSA. The new policies that were created for the NSA were in questionable legal standing and were only passed thanks to the combination of a “reinterpretation of the law” and multitudes of veiled threats to opposing members of government. I don’t see this making a difference.

This of course is assuming that Congress does not reactivate Section 215 on June 1^st. It would be hard to imagine that they would, but at this point, who would really be surprised?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_summary_of_the_Patriot_Act,_Title_II#Section_215:_Access_to_records_and_other_items_under_FISA

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/08/congress-must-end-mass-nsa-surveillance-with-next-patriot-act-vote