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IPFS News Link • Legislative Mischief

PATRIOT Act Reauthorization Fight Begins This Week

• cato.org

I've seen a very recent draft of the bill, and from my perspective in its current form the bill effectively acts as if the Snowden revelations and several independent reviews of the PATRIOT Act Sec. 215 metadata program never happened.

The bill ignores the fact that both the Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks and the 9/11 Commission itself found that the attacks happened because of information sharing and analytical failures, not because of intelligence collection shortfalls. The bill claims to end the controversial telephone metadata program, but a close reading of the bill reveals that it actually leaves key PATRIOT Act definitions of "person" or "U.S. Person" intact—and under 50 U.S.C. sec. 1801(m) of the PATRIOT Act, "person" is defined as "any individual, including any officer or employee of the Federal Government, or any group, entity, association, corporation, or foreign power." It's the "group, entity, association or corporation" language that leaves open the possibility of continued mass telephone metadata surveillance under the PATRIOT Act.


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