#section215

Trevor Paglen

“Paglen [has] said that blurriness serves both an aesthetic and an ‘allegorical’ function. It makes his images more arresting while providing a metaphor for the difficulty of uncovering the truth in an era when so much government activity is covert.”

Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which serves as the statutory authority for the NSA’s phone metadata collection program, is set to expire on June 1 of this year.  This particular provision of the 2001 Act signed by former President Bush has become a topic of major controversy after its details were leaked to the public in 2013 by former NSA-contractor Edward Snowden.  Based on the information leaked by Snowden, Section 215 allows for the federal government to record the date, duration, and parties to the phone calls of millions of American citizens without first having to demonstrate probable cause and obtain a specific warrant for each call.

Two attempts were made last year to overhaul the NSA’s authority granted in Section 215, with similar versions of a ‘USA Freedom Act’ being proposed in both houses of Congress.  Neither of the two proposed pieces of legislation received enough support from legislators to make it to their respective voting floor before the session ended.  Purportedly there has been recent discussion to draft another version of a USA Freedom Act style bill that could be introduced as early as this week, but that has yet to be seen.

Someone who is taking action in anticipation of Section 215′s June 1st expiration is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).  Last night, Mr. McConnell introduced a bill that could extend the expiration of Section 215 until 2020 and would leave the particularities of the law basically unchanged.  While the Senate bill appears to fall short of addressing any fundamental issues with a law such as Section 215, hopefully it will force lawmakers into action to start considering the revisionary measures that are necessary to ensure the constitutional compliance with any type of domestic surveillance program.

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mcconnell-introduces-bill-to-extend-nsa-surveillance/2015/04/21/fa4b66aa-e89d-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html?hpid=z4

The Associated Press recently released an article alleging that prior to Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaking of documents that exposed the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone metadata there was intense internal debate within the Agency over the potential termination of the program.  According to the article, many NSA employees questioned the efficiency of the program for its effectiveness in combating terrorism in relation to the burdensome costs necessary to operate and maintain it.  The telephone metadata program is still in effect today after the NSA was forced to admit and justify the existence of the program in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations.  The debate over necessity, however, is resurfacing as Congress is being forced to decide whether or not to renew Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which provides the NSA with the legal justification to preserve the telephone records of millions of American citizens and expires on June 1st of this year.  From the Associated Press via the Washington Post:

The internal critics pointed out that the already high costs of vacuuming up and storing the “to and from” information from nearly every domestic landline call were rising, the system was not capturing most cellphone calls, and program was not central to unraveling terrorist plots, the officials said. They worried about public outrage if the program ever was revealed.

TechCrunch:

The very last line of Apple’s report today states “Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.”