Privacy advocates had mixed reactions to the House...

Privacy advocates had mixed reactions to the House Judiciary Committee taking up the USA Freedom Act (HR-3361) for markup Wednesday at 1 p.m. as well as the substitute language key committee lawmakers plan to offer, as the committee announced earlier this week. “The mere fact that the Judiciary Committee is taking up this bill now is positive and encouraging,” the ACLU said (http://bit.ly/1kTXXHN). “The details still need to be hammered out, but the bill is certainly better than the one that the House Intelligence Committee will be considering this week, which is a non-starter.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the substitute a “potentially powerful approach to stopping the mass collection of phone records under the Patriot Act,” but said: “Nonetheless, we are deeply concerned about the number of ‘hops’ that the bill would permit, as well as the undefined phrase ’selection term,’ which may leave the door open to government attempts to take a nonintuitive interpretation of the language” (http://bit.ly/1if9Fg0). “We are also concerned that this bill [substitute language] omits important transparency provisions found in the USA FREEDOM Act, which are necessary to shed light on surveillance abuses.” The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute also said it was pleased the bill is being taken up but said it’s “dismayed to see that the strong transparency provisions in the original USA FREEDOM Act, which would have allowed Internet companies to engage in more reporting about the number and kind of government demands for information they receive and which were broadly supported by both industry and privacy advocates, have been removed” (http://bit.ly/1iZZFD7).