Goodlatte Praises USA Freedom; Privacy Advocates Question NSA's Use of FISA Section 702, EO 12333

“Bottom line is that the USA Freedom Act protects Americans’ civil liberties and enhances our national security,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., in a column on his website Friday. “In addition to ending the bulk collection of data by the federal government, the USA Freedom Act increases the transparency of the government’s intelligence-gathering programs by making more information available to the American public,” Goodlatte said. “It requires the declassification of all significant court opinions, mandates the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence provide the public with detailed information about how they use national security authorities, and provides technology companies with a range of options for describing how they respond to national security orders,” he said. “While this new law preserves key intelligence-gathering authorities, it replaces the NSA’s current, unlawful program with a new, targeted call detail records program." USA Freedom doesn’t stop the bulk collection of phone or email content authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) or fiber taps authorized by executive order 12333, former NSA intelligence official-turned-whistleblower William Binney told us. There are 80 to 100 taps on fiber cables in the lower 48 states and they're not solely along the coasts, so they can’t be just for foreigners, Binney said. Metadata collected from Section 215 of the Patriot Act was used to fill in the content gaps, he said. Following an article in The New York Times and ProPublica Thursday that said the NSA conducted warrantless surveillance on Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for malicious attacks, the Center for Democracy & Technology in a news release Friday called the NSA’s expanded role in battling cyberattacks troubling. Leaked documents show that the NSA is using Section 702 of FISA “in a far broader manner than previously understood,” CDT said. “By using Section 702 to collect information directly from main Internet cables in the U.S., the NSA is sweeping up communications of Americans, including those who have been victimized by cyber attacks,” it said. “The NSA sees surveillance as the flipside of cybersecurity,” said CDT Freedom, Security and Technology Project Director Greg Nojeim. “Being the victim of a cyber attack should not be a reason for the NSA to collect your communications and mine them for intelligence purposes,” Nojeim said. "The backdoor search loophole in Section 702 of FISA is a far bigger problem than we thought,” he said, especially since “collection under Section 702 gets the actual content of communications.”