| Summer Of Surveillance |
June 11, 2013 |
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Ted Poe, R-TX
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"What the PATRIOT Act does not allow is widespread, warrantless invasions of privacy where government blindly snoops around looking for some mischief. But the government claims it got some bad guys—two or three terrorists, it says. Well, if so, show us the cases. Those cases should be public if charges were filed. But that still doesn’t justify the invasion of privacy."
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| Providing For Consideration Of H.R. 624, Cyber Intelligence Sharing And Protection Act |
April 17, 2013 |
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Jared Polis, D-CO
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"Anyone who has read or watched any news source over the past year knows President Obama, numerous Administration officials, and many leaders in Congress agree that addressing the threat of cyber attacks is a critical national priority. Based on this threat analysis, the administration and many members of Congress continue to push for passage of cybersecurity legislation that would clarify and expand the government’s powers to receive and process traffic from American computer networks. It would, however, be a mistake for Congress to rush to enact legislation that could militarize our computer networks, and pave the way for private companies to share vast quantities of sensitive and highly personal information with the government, all in the name of “cybersecurity.” Although a carefully-crafted “information sharing” program that includes robust protections for civil liberties could be an effective approach to cybersecurity, the bill about to come up for a vote in the House clearly fails this test. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), H.R. 624, is set to be considered by the full House of Representatives later this month. Although the bill that emerged from markup by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) includes some improvements in privacy safeguards over the earlier version, CISPA’s proponents have overstated the protections incorporated into the bill. As a result, members of Congress should vote against CISPA when it comes to the House floor. Last year, The Constitution Project’s bipartisan Liberty and Security Committee, on which I serve, prepared a detailed report on ways that Congress could protect our nation’s computer networks from cyber threats, while at the same time preserving the constitutionally-guaranteed rights of Americans. Unfortunately, the drafters of CISPA failed to incorporate the robust safeguards we recommended. Most critical, CISPA’s sponsors have resisted all efforts to ensure that the new cybersecurity program would maintain civilian control of our nation’s computer networks. CISPA would allow private companies, cloaked with broad immunity from legal liability, to share sensitive information such as internet records or the content of emails, with any agency in the government, including military and intelligence agencies. Sensitive personal information from private computer networks should not be shared directly with the military or the National Security Agency (NSA), the agency that gained widespread public notoriety seven years ago for its warrantless wiretapping program—hardly the agency we want to see tasked with receiving private internet traffic. Sadly, the members of HPSCI voted down an amendment that would have ensured civilian control of computer networks, by specifying that when private companies share information with the federal government, they should not provide it to the NSA or any other military agency or department. This amendment would still have permitted the NSA to share its own expertise on cyber threats with the private sector, but would have protected the information flowing into the government. A second critical flaw with CISPA is that it fails to include meaningful limits on the extent of private sensitive information that companies can send into the government. The HPSCI also voted down an amendment requiring that before sharing cyber threat information with the government, companies must “make reasonable efforts” to remove “any information that can be used to identify a specific person unrelated to the cyber threat.” A similar provision was included in last year’s Senate cybersecurity bill, and witnesses at a hearing before HPSCI earlier this year testified that companies can easily strip out personally identifiably information that is not necessary to address cyber threats. Yet CISPA still lacks any such safeguard. It is true that from a privacy perspective, this version of CISPA is an improvement over last year’s bill. Most notably, the bill no longer permits private information to be used for broad `national security uses” unrelated to cybersecurity. But it clearly is not sufficient. Congress must take the civil liberties threats created by this bill just as seriously as it takes the cyber threats the legislation purports to address. CISPA does not meet this test, and members of the House should just say no."
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| Executive Session |
March 7, 2013 |
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Mark Udall, D-CO
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"We have seen during previous administrations the problems that can arise when even the intelligence committees are left out of the loop: warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary detention and torture. Ben Franklin put it well when he said: “Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”"
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| Urging European Union To Designate Hezbollah As A Terrorist Organization |
January 1, 2013 |
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Dennis Kucinich, D-OH
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"This is much to be preferred to the architecture of the national security state here at home which increasingly requires American citizens to give up their civil liberties to achieve a measure of security. Big Brother is hard at work in America, assembling huge databases of personal information, warrantless wiretaps, tracking phone calls, emails and internet searches, watching closely with new networks of cameras, new sophisticated drone technology, observing everything but the US Constitution."
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| Fisa Amendments Act Reauthorization Act Of 2012 |
December 28, 2012 |
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Mark Udall, D-CO
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"This amendment requires the Director of National Intelligence to provide information to Congress about the effects of the FISA Amendments Act on the privacy of America, which is something we all hold dear. It would require information on whether an estimation has been conducted of how many U.S. communications have been collected under the FISA Amendments Act and, if so, how many, whether any wholly domestic communications have been collected and whether officials have gone through these communications to conduct warrantless searches for the phone calls and e-mails of specific Americans."
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