by Sean Morris, Breitbart:
Lawmakers and privacy experts on both sides of the political spectrum are sounding the alarm on a provision in a spy powers reform bill that one senator described as one of the “most terrifying expansions of government surveillance” in history.
Eighty-six House Republicans last Friday voted for the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), a bill that would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Section 702 is a government surveillance authority that is meant to target foreign adversaries, but often surveils Americans’ communications without a warrant.
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Despite the outrage at the passage of the legislation, 110 Republicans also voted for an amendment proposed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) and committee Ranking Member Jim Himes (D-CT) that would seek dramatically expand the ability for the government to surveil Americans’ communications.
The measure updates the definition of electronic service provider to also include “any other service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.”
The amendment would significantly expand the number of businesses and their employees who could be compelled to spy on their customers and provide warrantless access to their communications systems in accordance to this controversial FISA provision.
This provision has been referred to by privacy advocates as a “trojan horse” for “PATRIOT Act 2.0.”
Steve Bradbury, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department under George W. Bush, told Breitbart News during a press conference on Monday that the Turner-Himes is so vast in scope that experts may not truly understand how many companies, staffers, and other entities may be forced to surveil Americans.
He said to “think about third party contractors who may have access to equipment? What about, for example, a janitorial company, who has a key to a data center and comes in and cleans up the data center floor or something? Technically, they have access to the equipment. Could the NSA [National Security Agency] hit the janitorial company with an order requiring them to give the NSA access to that data center? So, the implications of it are troubling. And the full scope is unknowable at this point.”
Bradbury said it is clear that the intelligence community lobbied that the Biden administration and the lobbied the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) to get this amendment included in the bill.
The former Justice Department official said that the proposal raises “obvious civil liberties concerns just because we do not know the potential sweep and how they will try to use it.”
