Don’t let US freedoms tumble in balancing privacy, security

Ever since the devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, maintaining a proper balance between personal privacy and national security often has required the dexterity, tenacity and agility of a skillful high-wire artist.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the United States too often tiptoed too far on the side of overzealous contraction of personal-privacy rights as a gut-level response to the colossal carnage in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania wrought by evil terrorists. The troubling movement toward repression surfaced most visibly in the original version of the USA Patriot Act of 2001, key planks of which were later ruled unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero “as the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.” The act later was revised to eliminate wholesale warrantless searches of information on virtually any and all Americans.

But as documents released by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden revealed last year, the hijacking of our civil liberties has continued, albeit surreptitiously and sleazily by functionaries at NSA. Snowden’s revelations showed the agency had been secretly harvesting millions of emails and instant-messaging contact lists of everyday Americans. Judges have challenged the practice’s constitutionality with one calling it “almost Orwellian.”

In an effort to rein in such excesses, the U.S. House of Representatives drafted, debated and last month passed the USA Freedom Act on a strong bipartisan 303-121 vote. The bill contains several promising and praiseworthy protections of civil liberties.

For example, it rightly moves the collection of phone data from the government to private phone companies; it limits the ability of NSA agents to request calling records more than two contacts away from a terrorism suspect; and it requires that opinions or orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court be made public, unless they would clearly expose intelligence sources or harm national security.

STRENGTHEN FREEDOM ACT

Despite those safeguards, the USA Freedom Act today limps along as a much weakened shadow of its former self. The original bill, for example, required that the government’s bulk collection of data be restricted to a specific “person, entity or account.” Those specifics are removed in the House-passed version. The watered-down bill also eliminated a requirement that the NSA present estimates on the number of Americans whose records have been gathered. It also did away with a public advocate to challenge the government’s arguments and protect individual civil rights in court.

As the bill wends its way into the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for hearings this month, legislators should seriously study whether the final House version does enough to provide adequate protections to abolish the type of wholesale attack on Americans’ private information that Snowden revealed.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., has said he was disappointed that the legislation lost some of its meaningful reforms and that he will push to restore them. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Cleveland, also has called for amendments to make the USA Freedom Act as strong as it can be as a means to value the lives and privacies of Americans.

To be sure, the balancing act in preserving Americans’ constitutional freedoms in the face of clear and present dangers from global terrorist groups requires that our government have effective tools to monitor threats. It does not, however, require excessively elevated and tightened clamps that could send our most- treasured First Amendment protections tumbling toward oblivion.