Bill protects Americans from NSA

Fifteen months after Edward Snowden provided the first documents describing the startling scope of the National Security Agency's spying program, Congress has returned from recess with a chance to vote on surveillance reform. Unfortunately, if the surveillance vote doesn't happen in the coming weeks, it might not happen at all.

Sen. Patrick Leahy's reformed USA Freedom Act, a bill that would begin to rein in the NSA's domestic surveillance program, is the best chance we have to make surveillance reform a reality in 2014. It has undergone multiple changes since it was first proposed a year ago. In its current compromise form, the bill still only begins to protect the many privacy rights that have been compromised by excessive surveillance. Nonetheless, if passed, it will be a crucial first step towards upholding Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches, while simultaneously reinforcing our counterterrorism efforts by making surveillance more strategic and evidence-based.

Legislation that establishes constitutional, common sense rules for domestic surveillance is clearly overdue. Despite the Snowden revelations, not a single law has been passed in the last year to prevent the NSA from suspicion-less domestic surveillance.

Public concern about excessive surveillance hasn't died down. The lead architect of the Patriot Act now believes it's time to take it apart. Wisconsin Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, an original cosponsor of the USA Freedom Act, believes that "(t)he collection and retention of all telephone records coming in and out of the United States is excessive and does not fall within the guidelines of (the Patriot Act)."

He is not alone. A majority of people believe the NSA's data collection program is a violation of Americans' privacy. President Obama's own surveillance review group found that "the current storage of bulk metadata creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy and civil liberty." Most Americans believe that the NSA has gone too far and that legislation is long overdue.

This legislation will pair greater oversight with the creation of a safety net for U.S. persons who believe their rights have been violated by the bulk collection programs. It would also require the government to report the total number of U.S. persons that were subject to orders authorizing surveillance. Such increases in transparency are key to self-governance and are needed to restore trust between the public and our elected officials. And it will also reform the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to provide more accountability and transparency, including by appointing a panel of privacy and civil liberties advocates to the court.

Even with these important provisions, it is not a perfect bill. It doesn't adequately address online data, such as email records, and it doesn't address surveillance conducted under other authorities, such as Executive Order 12333 or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act. But it opens the door to future reforms, rather than letting progress slip through the bureaucratic cracks in the Capitol building.

Those of us who call for the most basic surveillance reforms are occasionally told by a small group of detractors that doing so would put our national security at risk. This assumes that the more data the NSA collects, the safer we are. This simply isn't the case. Neither the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board nor the president's own review panel has been able to identify a single instance where the domestic surveillance program led to data that prevented a terror attack. If anything, the NSA bulk collection programs added to Americans' distrust of their own government.

Mary McCarthy is an attorney and former senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council.