{"id":22549,"date":"2020-03-03T20:22:48","date_gmt":"2020-03-04T04:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=22549"},"modified":"2020-03-03T20:22:48","modified_gmt":"2020-03-04T04:22:48","slug":"democrats-in-talks-to-bridge-surveillance-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=22549","title":{"rendered":"Democrats in talks to bridge surveillance divide"},"content":{"rendered":"

House Intelligence Chairman\u00a0Adam Schiff<\/a>\u00a0(D-Calif.) says Democrats are making progress\u00a0in their negotiations\u00a0over the reauthorization of a key surveillance bill, stating Tuesday that they are\u00a0working to include\u00a0more privacy protections.<\/p>\n

Intra-party rifts have emerged in recent weeks as some progressive Democrats and libertarian Republicans push to\u00a0include additional additional\u00a0privacy protection amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), while others argued that a clean reauthorization bill had a better chance of making it through the Senate.<\/p>\n

Schiff\u00a0says he and his staff\u00a0have been working the House Judiciary Committee as well as Reps.\u00a0Zoe Lofgren\u00a0(Calif.) and\u00a0Pramila Jayapal\u00a0(Wash.) — two\u00a0Judiciary Democrats who have pushed for more protections — in\u00a0an effort to get the bill passed by March 15. That’s the deadline to extend three expiring provisions of the USA Freedom Act\u00a0that\u00a0touch on\u00a0roving wiretaps, lone wolf surveillance,\u00a0and a controversial program that allows the U.S. government to request access to phone metadata.<\/p>\n

“We’re trying to find as much common ground as we can,” Schiff told The Hill. “We are trying to incorporate even more privacy protections in the hopes that we can get to an agreement in a timely way.”<\/p>\n

Schiff said some of Lofgren’s amendments are being considered, including an amicus provision that would add an outside advocate for every FISA case in which an American is targeted\u00a0as well as\u00a0make it illegal for the government to collect a U.S. citizen’s metadata.<\/p>\n

“We’re looking at\u00a0expanding the amicus provisions, we are looking\u00a0at limiting the period of attention to business records, what the business records provision can be used for,\u00a0making sure that\u00a0you can’t use the business records to get things you would need a court order for the criminal context,\u00a0limiting the use of geolocation data or their usage of\u00a0location information,” Schiff said.<\/p>\n

House Democrats last week were forced to pull their bill in the Judiciary Committee\u00a0and postpone a markup after\u00a0Lofgren\u00a0threatened to force votes on several FISA-related amendments. So far, a new markup has not been announced.<\/p>\n

Schiff indicated an understanding has been reached on the issue of metadata, but that they are still figuring out other issues like the amicus provisions.<\/p>\n

“We’re trying to figure out what’s the capacity of the amicus, but also how to\u00a0weed out those cases that are truly routine that don’t present any novel issues, making sure that that’s a real distinction,” he said.<\/p>\n

He said one area of disagreement is whether some provisions could overly constrain the gathering of intelligence.<\/p>\n

“Part of the issue is whether we use the FISA\u00a0process to impose constraints that are not even present in the criminal law process and that is a philosophical difference that may be driving some of the division on particular provisions,” he said.<\/p>\n

Jayapal, when asked about the state of negotiations, also said\u00a0there’s\u00a0more work to be done.<\/p>\n

“So far, we are just not there but we are continuing to talk and hope to see new proposals that address the areas we have raised,” Jayapal said, adding that she too hopes to reauthorize by the deadline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House Intelligence Chairman\u00a0Adam Schiff\u00a0(D-Calif.) says Democrats...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22550,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22549\/revisions\/22550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}