GOP Senators Try to Sneak Massive Surveillance Expansion Into Spending Bill
by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
TheNewAmerican.com
Monday, 19 March 2018
The unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens by agents of their own government could soon expand exponentially, should a controversial act be included in the forthcoming spending bill.
The legislation, called the “Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act,” or CLOUD Act, is sponsored by Senators Hatch, Coons, Graham, and Whitehouse, and they are trying to get the measure attached to the forthcoming spending bill.
Specifically, the CLOUD Act would increase unconstitutionally the authority of the executive branch of the federal government, granting it power to decide when and how data collected by law enforcement should be shared with foreign governments.
An article published by Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) summarizes the way that the bill breaks down the wall placed by the Fourth Amendment around the liberty of Americans. EFF reports:
The CLOUD Act has two major components. First, it empowers U.S. law enforcement to grab data stored anywhere in the world, without following foreign data privacy rules. Second, it empowers the president to unilaterally enter executive agreements with any nation on earth, even known human rights abusers. Under such executive agreements, foreign law enforcement officials could grab data stored in the United States, directly from U.S. companies, without following U.S. privacy rules like the Fourth Amendment, so long as the foreign police are not targeting a U.S. person or a person in the United States.
When foreign police use their power under CLOUD Act executive agreements to collect a foreign target’s data from a U.S. company, they might also collect data belonging to a non-target U.S. person who happens to be communicating with the foreign target. Within the numerous, combined foreign investigations allowed under the CLOUD Act, it is highly likely that related seizures will include American communications, including email, online chat, video calls, and internet voice calls.
As one might imagine, given their habit of trying to prevent the surveillance state from growing and ignoring the Constitution, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) issued a joint statement calling on Senate leadership to exclude the CLOUD Act from the spending bill and to require a separate debate and vote on the proposal.
After explaining that the act would remove the requirement that government agencies receive a warrant from a federal judge before conducting such surveillance sharing, the pair expressed their opposition to such overreach.
The CLOUD Act places far too much power in the President’s hands and denies Congress its critical oversight role. Specifically, the CLOUD Act permits the executive branch to enter into agreements with foreign governments and gives the House and Senate just 90 days to pass a resolution of disapproval to block it from going into effect. Instead of supplying a blanket pre-approval of these agreements, Congress should examine each agreement and determine — on an individual basis — whether the prohibitions on warrantless surveillance of stored and real-time communications should be waived with respect to each country.
It is a sobering fact that we have arrived as a country so far removed from our Constitution that senators would have to nearly beg the body’s leadership to uphold the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
To refresh your memory, the Fourth Amendment — the part of the Bill of Rights that would be legislatively repealed should the CLOUD Act be included in the spending bill — reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The Rest…HERE
