Senate Courts a Zero Rating on Privacy

​PPSA rated the 116th Congress (2019-2021) for votes to protect the privacy of Americans from intrusive surveillance. In the Senate, for example, 77 Senators voted in 2020 for a measure that would require a qualified legal expert to represent the civil liberties interests of the American people in sensitive cases before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). As a result of this and other key votes, PPSA was able to rate each Member of the Senate and House on a scale of 0 to 5 on their support for privacy.
 
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, for example, received a rating of 4, reflecting her strong stand in multiple votes for the measure to require civil liberties perspectives for sensitive FISC cases. As the Senate nears the end of the 117th Congress, and Senators turn their attention to the midterm elections in 2022, popular, viable, ready-to-pass bills on privacy and surveillance are at the ready. But will they actually get a vote on the Senate calendar?
 
These measures include:

• The Leahy-Lee Amendment, the FISC amicus requirement, did not make the manager’s amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 (the budget of the Department of Defense). PPSA and our civil liberties allies are urging Senators to now bring it up for a vote on the floor.

 

• The House attached the Jacobs-Davidson Amendment to the Department of Defense budget requiring the Pentagon to disclose its spending on buying the personal information of Americans scraped from apps and sold by data brokers. Given the strong bipartisan support for this disclosure requirement in the House, the Senate version, the Wyden-Daines Amendment, should move forward without opposition.

 

• House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler touted his NDO Fairness Act, which would end automatic gag orders that prevent communications service providers from informing their customers that they’ve been surveilled by prosecutors. That measure passed the House by voice vote. The Senate companion, introduced by Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee, has yet to move forward.

 

• The PRESS Act, which would grant a limited shield for journalists’ confidential sources, also passed the House. This measure, needed to allow journalists to expose domestic surveillance and hold government agencies accountable, could be another easy win in the Senate.

 
The House has done a solid job of passing bills that protect Americans’ privacy from government surveillance. Their companion bills enjoy strong bipartisan support from leaders that include Sens. Patrick Leahy, Mike Lee, Steve Daines, Ron Wyden, and others. We hope the full Senate follows their lead. We want to give all Senators a strong rating for following these privacy leaders and passing measures to restore at least some of Americans’ privacy.