New act will reduce ability to spy on citizens

This editorial originally appeared in the Wednesday edition of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Privacy advocates scored a rare victory last week in Washington, D.C., as an oddly divided U.S. Senate opted to sunset some government agencies’ most far-reaching surveillance methods. At issue was the bulk collection of U.S. citizens’ phone data records, which for years the National Security Agency has warehoused as part of the war on terror.

Resentment against surveillance-state aspects of the Patriot Act has been simmering since the early 2000s; the disclosure of the NSA’s phone data collection program in 2013 heated the issue further. With the votes of both of its senators and Rep. Don Young, Alaska has helped the nation take a step back from near-unfettered access to citizens’ data by the government.

The new surveillance law providing sunset dates for some Patriot Act provisions is known as the USA Freedom Act. Its most important provision will end the NSA’s phone record collection program in six months. Until now, the security agency was able to comb U.S. citizens’ phone records, largely without court orders or oversight, looking for potential connections with terror-related groups or individuals.

In six months, when that program expires, the agency will have to seek specific phone records with a court order and will have to request those records from phone companies rather than maintaining their own massive database.

Those two steps — removing the records from direct, permanent government control and requiring court oversight of the process by which surveillance is ordered — will still leave many uneasy. Government agencies still have broad surveillance powers, some of which target citizens on U.S. soil. This week, an investigation by The Associated Press revealed the FBI maintains an aerial surveillance program with dozens of small aircraft at cities around the U.S., and does so largely without court oversight.

The FBI has also operated dummy cellular towers that mimic those of wireless carriers and can harvest location information from nearby devices. For those concerned with privacy, there’s still plenty against which to push back.

But the passage of the USA Freedom Act, supported by both Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Dan Sullivan, represents an important material and symbolic victory for citizens over a creeping baseline of government surveillance. While the act doesn’t do away with security agencies’ ability to monitor citizens’ call records, it does at least take that data out of their hands and require an independent branch of the government to verify surveillance is justified.

Alaskans are rightly concerned about privacy, so much so that the right to privacy was added by the people to the state’s constitution in 1972. As the U.S. continues marching further into the 21st century, new technologies and practices will continue to increase the ability of the government and private citizens to engage in surveillance.

But with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, there has finally been a declaration at the highest level that some surveillance actions have gone too far and need to be stepped back.

That’s an important marker to place, and Alaskans should continue to participate in the conversation about what level of surveillance is ultimately deemed appropriate to balance liberty and safety.