These Are The Senators Supporting Bipartisan FISA, NSA Reform Bill

A bipartisan group of United States senators introduced a bill Tuesday that would aim to rein in aspects of the National Security Agency’s surveillance initiatives by requiring a warrant be granted to access any data on American citizens collected through the program.

The bill, known as the USA Rights Act, was introduced by Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. It is co-sponsored by Senators Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.; Tom Udall, D-N.M.; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii.; Ed Markey, D-Mass; and Jon Tester, D-Mont.

The USA Rights Act focuses on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a controversial program that was first revealed to the public in 2013 by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Section 702 grants the NSA the ability to gather intelligence on foreigners located overseas without a warrant. The law allows the agency to collect data that transfers across networks owned or operated by telecommunications companies that are located in the U.S.

Because of the broad data collection practices allowed by Section 702, the provision has also been used to gather information from American citizens who are caught up in the wide net cast by the program, despite constitutional protections against warrantless surveillance.

Through Section 702, the NSA collects massive amounts of communications, which include emails, messages and phone metadata. That information is made available in a database which law enforcement agencies—including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and local police forces—are able to access.

The USA Rights Act would put an end to warrantless access to that database. It would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a probable-cause warrant before viewing any information from the Section 702 database that includes an American citizen.

The bill would also stop “About collection,” a controversial practice that the NSA claimed it would cease in April. “About collection” granted the agency the ability to collect any communications about a foreign target allowed the agency to collect communications that are simply about a foreign target—a standard so broad that it could include emails between two Americans who simply mention the name of one of the NSA’s more than 100,000 foreign targets.

"Without common-sense protections for Americans' liberties, this vast surveillance authority is nothing less than an end-run around the Constitution," Senator Wyden said in a statement. "Our bill gives intelligence agencies the authority they need to protect our country, but safeguards our essential freedoms with new provisions requiring judicial oversight and pushing back on the creeping expansion of secret law."

The USA Rights has already gained a significant amount of support from a number of civil rights and government transparency groups including FreedomWorks, Demand Progress and the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The USA RIGHTS Act offers government surveillance reform that Americans need and constitutionally should have," Michelle Richardson, the deputy director of the Freedom, Security, and Technology Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told International Business Times in a statement.

"Most importantly, it would close the backdoor loophole in Section 702 that allows the government to search the mass troves of data collected through the program for the private communications of Americans without obtaining a warrant. The law was clearly never intended for this egregious use, and the USA RIGHTS Act finally makes that clear," she said.

Wyden and Paul’s measure serves as a competing piece of legislation introduced earlier this month by another set of lawmakers with the intention of lessening the reach of Section 702.

That bill—introduced to the Congress by House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and vice-chairman John Conyers, D-Mich.—would require the FBI to obtain a warrant before accessing data about Americans from the NSA’s database. The ACLU and other organizations claimed the bill did not go far enough to curb the NSA’s surveillance powers.