Kevin Reed
In a declassified letter to Congressional leaders, the outgoing Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats called for the “permanent reauthorization of the provisions of the USA Freedom Act of 2015 that are currently set to expire in December.” The top Trump administration intelligence official wrote that among these provisions are the National Security Agency’s (NSA) officially suspended bulk collection of “telephone records from US telecommunications providers.”
Coats’ letter was addressed to the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Richard Burr (Republican, North Carolina) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (Democrat, Virginia) and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Lindsay Graham (Republican, South Carolina) and Ranking Committee Member Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California). The day after his letter was declassified on August 14, Coats departed the White House following his formal resignation as Director of National Intelligence on July 29.
Writing on behalf of the Intelligence Community (IC) and the White House, Coats said—in addition to requesting restoration of bulk phone data collection—there are three key “long-standing national security authorities” contained in the USA Freedom Act that are “common sense” and “have no history of abuse after more than 18 years, and should be reauthorized without sunset.”
These three authorizations are: the “business records” provision that permits federal law enforcement to seize tangible items like business papers and documents in a FISA court approved foreign intelligence investigation; the “roving wiretap” provision that permits national security agencies to tap calls from telephone numbers not specifically authorized by the FISA court; and the “lone wolf” provision that permits national security agencies to identify someone as a terrorist without having to show that they are an “agent of a foreign power” as required by other laws.
The USA Freedom Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on June 2, 2015. The act restored several provisions of the USA Patriot Act such as the roving wiretap and lone wolf authorizations that had expired. At that time, the act was fraudulently packaged by the Obama administration and the corporate media as a “reform” of intelligence practices following the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government was carrying out secret bulk collection of telephone records of the entire population.
As explained at the time on the World Socialist Web Site, the 2015 USA Freedom Act is a fig leaf behind which the vast electronic illegal surveillance activities of the NSA was continued and expanded with explicit Congressional approval. The passage of the act is an object lesson in the complicity of the entire American government and its two-party system in ever-deepening attacks on democratic rights.
A phony debate between Congressional Democrats and Republicans, along with bromides from Obama about the importance of “the safety of the American people” were played up in the media as an effort to “strike a balance” between national security and privacy rights. In the end, the legislation was signed into law and it enabled the resumption of the NSA’s bulk data operations contained in the expired USA Patriot Act by adding a step whereby the telecom companies had to collect and hold the data.
Coats wrote in his letter that the NSA “has suspended the call detail records program” that was authorized by the USA Freedom Act and deleted all of the data that was gathered under its authorization.
This decision was widely reported in June when it was revealed that the NSA had been “improperly” collecting phone records as far back as October 2018 outside the provisions of the 2015 law. Basically, what had been revealed was that the NSA had not modified its practice and, after this fact came to light, the agency said it was deleting three years of data going back to 2015, some 685 million phone call records.
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