Sens. Wyden and Lee, Reps. Davidson and Lofgren, Introduce Wide-Ranging Reform of Government Surveillance

The Government Surveillance Reform Act (GSRA)

​Four bipartisan champions of civil liberties – Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) – today introduced the Government Surveillance Reform Act (GSRA), legislation that restores force to overused Capitol Hill adjectives like “landmark,” “sweeping,” and “comprehensive.”
 
“The Government Surveillance Reform Act is ambitious in scope, thoughtful in its details, and wide-ranging in its application,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and PPSA’s Senior Policy Advisor. “The GSRA is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for wide-ranging reform.”
 
The GSRA curbs the warrantless surveillance of Americans by federal agencies, while restoring the principles of the Fourth Amendment and the policies that underlie it. The authors of this bill set out to achieve this goal by reforming how the government uses three mechanisms to surveil the American people.
 

• One mechanism is government spying on Americans’ telephone, text, and email communications with foreign persons, incidentally caught up in data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Section 702 is set to expire in December, which offers a legislative platform to reform not just that authority, but also other forms of warrantless government surveillance.

 

• The government spies on Americans’ communications and data of all kinds, including Americans’ internet activity, under a presidential directive known as Executive Order 12333. This is a self-proclaimed authority of the executive branch not authorized by a specific statute.

 

• And finally, federal agencies spy on Americans’ sensitive information of all kinds, including Americans’ location and internet histories, using private, personal data scraped from apps and sold to the government by third-party data brokers. The government takes other data from spy tools, such as cell-site simulators, that mimic cell towers to trick the cellphones of people within a geofenced area into giving up their location and other personal data.

 
The GSRA will rein in this ballooning surveillance system in many ways.
 

• It contains a general prohibition of the warrantless searches of the personal information of people in the United States. This prohibition includes warrantlessly acquired communications and geolocation, web browsing, and internet search history data. But it allows for reasonable exceptions in emergencies, such as identifying malicious software and countering imminent threats, such as terrorism.

 

• The GSRA ends the “backdoor search loophole” – through which agencies search for specific American communications within the massive database compiled under Section 702. This prohibition also includes reasonable exceptions for emergencies.

 

• The GSRA imposes a four-year sunset on Section 702, strengthening future Congressional oversight of that program.

 

• It phases out surveillance conducted under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act – an authority that gave the government warrantless access to Americans’ “business records.” This expansive authority allowed searches of documents and emails of Americans’ stored in the cloud. Although Section 215 lapsed in 2020, agencies are authorized to continue using it in some cases. Government reports show that Section 215 surveillance is now approaching pre-sunset levels.

 

• The GSRA requires the secret FISA court to appoint civil liberties experts as amici to advise it in handling warrant requests in sensitive cases that threaten the constitutional rights of Americans.

 

• This bill limits the circumstances in which the federal government can warrantlessly use cell-site simulators, which pick up private data from cell phones.

 

• It holds officials in the FBI, CIA, NSA, ODNI and DOJ to account for negligent, willful, or knowing violations of the GSRA, FISA, or Executive Order 12333. In egregious cases, officials can be fired and stripped of their security clearances.

 
“The GSRA enjoys widespread bipartisan support because it represents the most balanced and comprehensive surveillance reform bill in 45 years,” Goodlatte said. “PPSA joins with a wide-ranging coalition of civil liberties organizations to urge Congress to make the most of this rare opportunity to put guardrails on federal surveillance of Americans.
 
“We commend Senators Wyden and Lee, and Representatives Davidson and Lofgren, for writing such a thorough and precise bill in the protection of the constitutional rights of every American.”