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Rand Paul Pushes the Overton Window, Forces Republican Opponents to Side with President Obama

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The Senate voted on a piece of legislation reforming the National Security Agency 77-17, but three crucial sections of the beleaguered US Patriot Act — the lapse is due in large part to Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul opposition.

Screenshot 2014-10-15 11.06.19Section 215, which the FISA court has ruled allows warrentless bulk telephony data collection, is now banished from the law books until the ominously named USA Freedom Act is passed through the Senate sometime later this week. The cri de coeur has put hawkish Republicans in the unenviable position of defending a law that is supported by the Obama administration even as the political campaign season begins to gear up.

Obama has given full-throated support of the measure and had repeatedly urged lawmakers to support it in the days leading up to Sunday’s deadline. The bill needed 60 votes in order to advance to cloture.

“The Senate took an important — if late — step forward tonight,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement late on Sunday. “We call on the Senate to ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible. On a matter as critical as our national security, individual Senators must put aside their partisan motivations and act swiftly. The American people deserve nothing less.”

In fact, President Obama himself struck a hawkish note on Saturday, warning Congress and the public that terrorists “aren’t suddenly going to stop plotting against us at midnight tomorrow. And we shouldn’t surrender the tools that help keep us safe.”

Paul spoke in opposition to the USA Freedom Act on the Senate floor Sunday, arguing that the reform measure is an ineffective tool to defend constitutional rights. The legislation was approved by the House 338-88 earlier in an earlier iteration in early May.

He would rather the intelligence community acquire warrants on individual cases, as opposed to collecting bulk intelligence on the general population.

“I’m not going to take it anymore,” Paul declared. “I don’t think the American people are going to take it anymore.”

“The right to be left alone is the most cherished of rights! This debate is over your right to be left alone,” Paul said, his voice rising to a shout. He continued: “I’m convinced we can use the Fourth Amendment, spirit and letter of the law, and catch terrorists.”

Tensions between Paul and other Senate Republicans were evident throughout Sunday’s proceedings — particularly when the libertarian-tinged Republican rose to voice his opposition to the reform bill when Republican Sens. Dan Coates of Indiana, and John McCain of Arizona were holding the floor.

“The senator from Kentucky needs to learn the rules of the Senate,” McCain said.

“Maybe the senator from Kentucky should know the rules of the Senate.”

“I think he obviously has a higher priority for his fundraising and political ambitions than for the security of the nation,” McCain sneered.

“It (Section 215) is more essential than ever,” said Coats, a member of the Intelligence Committee and defender of the NSA, aping the president’s ominous tones. “It is more necessary than ever as we’ve seen a higher threat level since 9/11.”

Proponents of the much ballyhooed Patriot Act program, also claim that the metedata collected does not present a violation of privacy rights, because, they say, there is no content attached to the collected data.

Chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal), for instance, told Washington Post reporters last year, “as you know, this is just metadata. There is no content involved. In other words, no content of a communication.”

But researchers beg to differ. The NSA’s mass surveillance of telephone metadata could yield detailed information about the private lives of American citizens, according to research conducted by Sanford computer scientists Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler.

Mayer and Mutchler’s findings suggest that NSA mined metadata from cell phone calls can capture intimate detail about a person’s family, religious, professional, political and sexual associations.   Image

The researchers gathered their results by working through the phone records of 546 volunteers, matching the volunteers’ phone numbers against Google Place directories to find out whom the volunteers were calling. In all, the participants called 33, 688 numbers, 6,107 of which were to specific individual people.

From the MetaPhone data, Mayer and Mutchler were able to ascertain that 57 percent of the respondents made medical phone calls, 40 percent made financial service calls, 8 percent made calls to religious associations, 7 percent made phone calls to firearm sells and repair stores and 2 percent made phone calls to adult establishments.

What was most alarming, Mutchler said, was the degree of sensitivity among the contacts. “Participants had calls with Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more,” Mutchler said.

Civil rights watchdogs, howerver, are saying that Sen. Paul’s fight against the bulk collection of telephone metadata is akin to tilting at windmills. The ACLU’s Chris Soghoian, for example, explained at a talk earlier this month why the current debate over Section 215 of the Patriot Act is just a minor bump in a much larger and much more complex bulk collection program by the FBI and the NSA.

In short, we need to focus on the other forms of communication that the government can spy on–Facebook, Twitter, emails, and calling cards, he says, are all fodder for the NSA. Yet, the public has no idea how the government obtains the records.

His explanation begins at the 26-minute point and concludes around the 40-minute mark.

There were 180 orders authorized last year by the FISA Court under Section 215 — 180 orders issued by this court. Only five of those orders relate to the telephony metadata program. There are 175 orders about completely separate things. In six weeks, Congress will either reauthorize this statute or let it expire, and we’re having a debate — to the extent we’re even having a debate — but the debate that’s taking place is focused on five of the 180, and there’s no debate at all about the other 175 orders.

…We don’t know, for example, how the government collects records from Internet providers. We don’t know how they get bulk metadata from tech companies about Americans. We don’t know how the American government gets calling card records.

…So the 215 program that has been disclosed publicly, the 215 program that is being debated publicly, is about records to major carriers like AT&T and Verizon. We have not had a debate about surveillance requests, bulk orders to calling card companies, to Skype, to voice over Internet protocol companies.”

…Certainly the government is collecting that data, but we don’t know how they’re doing it, we don’t know at what scale they’re doing it, and we don’t know with which authority they’re doing it. And I think it is a farce to say that we’re having a debate about the surveillance authority when really, we’re just debating this very narrow usage of the statute.”



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