Name: Yes, Section 215 Expired. Now What?
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Yes, Section 215 Expired. Now What?

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItOn March 15, 2020, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act—a surveillance law —expired. Along with two other PATRIOT Act provisions, Section 215 lapsed after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a broader set of reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).In the week before the law expired, the House of Representatives passed the&nbsp;, without committee markup or floor amendments, which would have extended Section 215 for three more years, along with some modest reforms.&nbsp;In order for any bill to , the House and Senate must pass an identical bill, and the President must sign it. That didn’t happen with the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act. Instead, knowing the vote to proceed with the House’s bill in the Senate without debating amendments was going to fail, Senator McConnell brought a bill to the floor that would extend all the expiring provisions for another 77 days, without any reforms at all. Senator McConnell's extension passed the Senate without debate.But the House of Representatives left town without passing Senator McConnell’s bill, at least until , and possibly longer. That means that Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, along with the so-called lone wolf and the roving wiretap provisions have expired, at least for a few weeks.EFF has argued that if Congress can’t agree on real reforms to these problematic laws, they should be . While we are pleased that , it is only one of a number of largely overlapping surveillance authorities. The loss of the current version of the law will still leave the government that is still incredibly powerful. These include other provisions of FISA as well as surveillance authorities used in criminal investigations, many of which can include gag orders to protect sensitive information.In addition, the and others have noted that Section 215’s expiration clause contains an exception permitting the intelligence community to use the law for investigations that were ongoing at the time of expiration or to investigate “offenses or potential offenses” that occurred before the sunset. Broad reliance on this exception would subvert Congress’s intent to have Section 215 truly expire, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court should carefully—and publicly—circumscribe any attempt to rely on it.Although Section 215 and the two other provisions have expired, that doesn’t mean they’re gone forever. For example, in 2015, during the debate over the USA FREEDOM Act, these same provisions were also allowed to expire for a short period of time, and then Congress reauthorized them for another four years. While transparency is still lacking in how these programs operate, the intelligence community did not report a disruption in any of these “critical” programs at that time. If Congress chooses to reauthorize these programs in the next couple of months, it’s unlikely that this disruption will have a lasting impact.The Senate plans to vote on a series of amendments to the House-passed USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act in the near future. Any changes made to the bill would then have to be approved by the House and signed by the President. This means that Congress has the opportunity to discuss whether these authorities are actually needed, without the pressure of a ticking clock.As a result, the House and the Senate should take this unique opportunity to learn more about these provisions and create additional oversight into the surveillance programs that rely on them. The expired provisions should remain expired until Congress enacts the additional, meaningful reforms we’ve been seeking.You can read more about what EFF is calling for when it comes to , , and restoring Americans’ privacy .Share ItIn a victory for users, Slack has fixed its for free workspaces. Instead of holding onto your messages on its servers for as long as your workspace exists, Slack is now giving free workspace admins the option to automatically delete all messages older than 90 days....Earlier this week, EFF, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Demand Progress expressing our concerns about H.R. 3962, The Securing and Enabling Commerce Using Remote and Electronic Notarization Act of 2021 or SECURE Notarization Act. This bill would require states to recognize...The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will soon rule on Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drones, which are capable of flying while its operator (pilot) is far away. While these types of drones might offer benefits to society—think of deliveries, infrastructure inspection, and precision agriculture—they also pose serious threats to...The scourge of stalkerware—malicious apps used by perpetrators of domestic violence to secretly spy on their victims—is not going unchallenged or unaddressed. are increasingly adding stalkerware to the list of apps their products detect on devices; victim help people figure out whether their devices are...A growing number of states have transgender youths from obtaining gender-affirming health care. So these youths and their families must travel out-of-state for necessary health care. The states they visit are health care sanctuaries.These states must also be data sanctuaries for transgender youths.Earlier this year, the governor of...Internet users’ private messages, files, and photos of everyday people are increasingly being examined by tech companies, which check the data against government databases. While this is not a new practice, the public is being told this massive scanning should extend to nearly every reach of their online activity so...Jump straight to the Today, the vast majority of websites and emails that you encounter contain some form of tracking. Third-party cookies let advertisers follow you around the web; tracking pixels in emails confirm whether you’ve opened them; tracking links ensure websites...The ease with which bad actors can find a worldwide market for malicious apps that spy on people’s digital devices is at the center of an Australian Federal Police case against a man who, starting at the age of 15, wrote a stalkerware application and sold it to 14,500 people...When data broker SafeGraph , it had a public relations trick up its sleeve. After the company agreed to from its platforms in response to public outcry, CEO Auren Hoffman tried to flip the narrative:...There's a lot of discussion right now about how a federal privacy , the American Data Privacy Protection Act (H.R.8152), will affect state privacy laws. EFF has on this: federal privacy laws should not roll back state privacy protections. The ADPPA, as currently written, would...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItOn March 15, 2020, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act—a surveillance law —expired. Along with two other PATRIOT Act provisions, Section 215 lapsed after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a broader set of reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).In the week before the law expired, the House of Representatives passed the&nbsp;, without committee markup or floor amendments, which would have extended Section 215 for three more years, along with some modest reforms.&nbsp;In order for any bill to ,...

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Andrew Crocker

India McKinney

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Yes, Section 215 Expired. Now What?

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