Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) on Wednesday proposed legislation to eliminate the intelligence community’s surveillance tools that “erode” Americans’ civil liberties.
“For over two decades, rogue actors within our U.S. intelligence agencies have used the PATRIOT Act to create the most sophisticated, unaccountable surveillance apparatus in the Western world,” Luna said in a written statement to Breitbart News.
Luna introduced the American Privacy Restoration Act, a bill that would repeal the USA PATRIOT Act, a sweeping September 11th, 2001 terrorist bill that drastically expanded government surveillance.
Elizabeth Goitein, Senior Director for the Liberty & National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, described how the post-9/11 law dramatically increased warrantless surveillance of Americans’ communications:
In a variety of contexts, it became lawful for the government to collect an American’s sensitive information based merely on a claim that the information was “relevant” to a legitimate purpose, regardless of whether the person was reasonably suspected of wrongdoing. Even for the most sensitive of information, communications content, Congress gave the NSA free rein to collect phone calls, texts, and emails between foreign targets and Americans — communications that previously could not be obtained domestically without a court order based on probable cause.
Ironically, according to Goitein, the increased mass surveillance has not yielded safety benefits:
Also unsurprisingly, there is zero evidence that suspicionless surveillance has made us safer. Consider the NSA’s program of “bulk collection” — the poster child for suspicionless surveillance — in which the agency obtained Americans’ phone records en masse. Two independent reviews found that this program yielded little-to-no counterterrorism benefit. Indeed, there is evidence that overcollection is counterproductive. Multiple government reviews of domestic terrorist incidents have found that agents missed signs of trouble because those signs were lost in the noise of irrelevant data. [Emphasis added]
“Achieving this goal will require restoring limitations that were stripped out of the law after 9/11, as well as enacting new ones to ensure that Americans’ sensitive information is protected from disclosure regardless of who holds the information or the technology used to capture it,” Goitein wrote about the need to restore pre-9/11 protections for civil liberties.
Luna introduced her legislation as the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing in April on warrantless government surveillance.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) said, “We need to make sure we win this time. During 2024 debate to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), privacy-oriented lawmakers nearly passed an amendment to legislation that would have required a warrant for searches of Americans’ communications.”
As Congress inches towards reauthorizing surveillance laws next year, Luna looks to rein in governments’ ability to conduct warrantless searches that trample Americans’ constitutional protections.
“My legislation will strip the deep state of these tools and protect every American’s fourth amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. It’s past time to reign in our intelligence agencies and restore the right to privacy. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is using ‘security’ as an excuse to erode your freedom,” Luna concluded in her statement.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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