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On Thursday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a draft authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against ISIL (full text) by a margin of 10-8 along party lines. The text also includes an amendment that would sunset the 2001 AUMF in three-years. Most of today’s news headlines will be focused on the authorization to fight ISIL—and we will have plenty of discussion about it at Just Security. But the sunset of the 2001 AUMF is highly significant in its own right – and it should be welcome news to a wide range of national security law experts across the political spectrum, as Jack Goldsmith, Steve Vladeck, and I discussed in an  Op-Ed in the Washington Post. (Indeed, a sunset of the 2001 AUMF is endorsed by the Principles for drafting an ISIL AUMF published at Just Security and a proposed AUMF published at Lawfare.)

The action on the 2001 sunset was a bit of a surprise because  Sen. Menendez’s draft ISIL AUMF did not originally include a provision to sunset the 2001 AUMF. Nor did Sen. Tim Kaine’s similar draft AUMF. Both Senators Menendez and Kaine, however, spoke strongly in favor of the amendment today (and I applaud them for that). The action on the 2001 AUMF is significant as a potential turning point in the armed conflict with Al Qaeda. In his National Defense University speech in May 2013, President Obama called for refining and eventually repealing the 2001 AUMF when conditions permit. He stated: “I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the [2001] AUMF’s mandate.” Placing a sunset on the 2001 AUMF has been a key plank in Harold Koh’s position, in testimony and in Just Security posts (here and here), outlining how the President can bring an eventual end to the “Forever War.” Another part of that roadmap includes disengaging from Afghanistan. It is notable that today’s decision on the 2001 sunset also comes on the heels of yesterday’s news of the closure of the detention facility at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. At least these aspects of the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban may be winding down or narrowing, albeit while the conflict with ISIL heats up.

Increase transparency. Neither Congress nor the American public has a clear idea whom the United States is fighting or where, especially when it comes to forces associated with al-Qaeda. Any new AUMF should require the president to identify the groups against which force is used, along with related details, regularly in a report to Congress and, unless strictly required by national security, the American people. The president should also share with Congress, and the public to the extent possible, the administration’s legal rationales for using force. Such transparency rules should also be imposed on the 2001 AUMF … Congress should also consider imposing these transparency requirements on uses of force against terrorists under the president’s Article II powers. 3) Geographic limits on ISIL AUMF Sen. Rand Paul proposed an amendment to limit the ISIL AUMF so that the authorization to use force does not apply “outside of the geographic boundaries of Iraq and Syria.” He explained that if ISIL moves some of its forces outside of Iraq and Syria, the administration could return to Congress for additional authorities. That amendment was defeated in a separate vote. With a group of seven other national security law experts, I have supported geographic limits on an ISIL AUMF, but not as restrictive as the limits that Sen. Paul proposes. Our set of Principles recommend Congress to authorize force in Iraq and Syria as well as “any other locations from which ISIL forces actively plan and/or launch attacks against the United States or Iraq.” As Sen. Paul noted, a recent study found that 60 percent of congressional force authorizations have contained geographic limitations.

President Obama’s plan to destroy the Islamic State militant organization, also known as ISIL, puts the United States on the brink of another war.   Although Congress has not authorized the use of military force against ISIL, the President has been bombing targets in Iraq for more than 60 days.  While the President may have defined our enemy, there are still serious questions that have not been answered—and should be—before our nation once again puts our men and women in uniform in harm’s way. We urge Congress to hold a robust, transparent and fact-based debate. Perhaps the first question that must be answered is whether this new war can be waged under the existing 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMF).  If the President is utilizing either of these two authorizations, then he must release the Office of Legal Counsel justifications for doing so.

Congress must debate and decide whether to authorize the continued use of force against ISIL. This would also provide legal justification should the President seek to extend current military action into Syria, where ISIL enjoys a base of support.  The parameters of our military action should be clear—the President should not expect to be given a “blank check.”  Beyond the question of legal authority, Congress and the President need to be clear on how this war will be funded, how success will be measured and when it will end.

The nation’s top technology firms and a coalition of privacy groups are urging Congress to place curbs on government surveillance in the face of a fast-approaching deadline for legislative action. A set of key Patriot Act surveillance authorities expire June 1, but the effective date is May 21 — the last day before Congress breaks for a Memorial Day recess. In a letter to be sent Wednesday to the Obama administration and senior lawmakers, the coalition vowed to oppose any legislation that, among other things, does not ban the “bulk collection” of Americans’ phone records and other data.

We know that there are some in Congress who think that they can get away with reauthorizing the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act without any reforms at all,” said Kevin Bankston, policy director of New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, a privacy group that organized the effort. “This letter draws a line in the sand that makes clear that the privacy community and the Internet industry do not intend to let that happen without a fight.” At issue is the bulk collection of Americans’ data by intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency. The NSA’s daily gathering of millions of records logging phone call times, lengths and other “metadata” stirred controversy when it was revealed in June 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The records are placed in a database that can, with a judge’s permission, be searched for links to foreign terrorists.They do not include the content of conversations.

That program, placed under federal surveillance court oversight in 2006, was authorized by the court in secret under Section 215 of the Patriot Act — one of the expiring provisions. The public outcry that ensued after the program was disclosed forced President Obama in January 2014 to call for an end to the NSA’s storage of the data. He also appealed to Congress to find a way to preserve the agency’s access to the data for counterterrorism information.

(CNN)Elton Simpson -- one of the gunmen who opened fire Sunday at an event in Garland, Texas, that was celebrating cartoonists who had drawn pictures of the Prophet Mohammed -- appears to have declared his allegiance to ISIS in a tweet before the attack. Simpson also apparently had online ties to a British ISIS recruit believed to be in Syria. Simpson, who was shot to death by police, is far from the only American who who has been drawn to the black flags of ISIS as well as to the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria known as the Nusra Front.There are 62 individuals in the United States that New America has identified in public records or news accounts who have tried to join militant groups in Syria such as ISIS or Nusra, or have succeeded in joining such groups, or have helped others to join such groups.

This morning, the White House sent Congress the text of its proposed Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Islamic State. The proposed legislation includes strengths and weaknesses that deserve careful analysis and debate. Overall, the proposal would set important, if imperfect, limits on the war against the Islamic State, including: a three-year sunset clause, a careful definition of associated forces, and the repeal of the 2002 AUMF. But the proposal also includes a number of significant problems, including: a faux prohibition on large-scale ground combat operations that is effectively meaningless because of extremely poor wording, a lack of geographic limits, the potential application to ill-defined future “successors” of the Islamic State, and a failure to make clear the 2001 AUMF does not apply to the war against the Islamic State. This last step is important to prevent the current or future presidents from using the authority of the 2001 law to bypass any limitations in an Islamic State-specific authorization. The Obama Administration deserves credit for stepping up and offering an AUMF with some constructive provisions, but now the task is to use the congressional process to keep the good aspects, improve the imperfect aspects, and prevent worse provisions from being inserted into the proposal.

When the premiere surveillance reform bill of 2014 is reintroduced in the current Congress, it can count on antipathy and even opposition from many of the civil libertarian activists who pushed it to the brink of passage last year. The USA Freedom Act, a bill that aims to stop the National Security Agency (NSA) from its daily collection of US phone records in bulk, is set for a 2015 revamp after failing in the Senate last November. Supporters pledge to unveil it late this week or early next week.

This time, as reported by the Guardian, the bill is shaping up to be the preferred piece of legislation to extend the lifespan of a controversial part of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215. The NSA uses Section 215 to justify its domestic mass surveillance. The FBI considers it critical for terrorism and espionage investigations outside typical warrant or subpoena channels. Section 215 expires on 1 June. The bill’s architects consider the USA Freedom Act the strongest piece of legislation to roll back the domestic reach of US surveillance that Congress will pass. But a new coalition of civil libertarian groups on the left and the right is already looking past the bill, in the hopes of broadening what is possible – something they consider realistic, thanks to the intelligence community’s fervent desire to avoid the expiration of Section 215.

After only one hour of floor debate, and no allowed amendments, the House of Representatives today passed legislation that opponents believe may give brand new authorization to the U.S. government to conduct domestic dragnets. The USA Freedom Act was approved in a 338-88 vote, with approximately equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans voting against. The bill’s supporters say it will disallow bulk collection of domestic telephone metadata, in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has regularly ordered phone companies to turn over such data. The Obama administration claims such collection is authorized by Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which is set to expire June 1. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently held that Section 215 does not provide such authorization. Today’s legislation would prevent the government from issuing such orders for bulk collection and instead rely on telephone companies to store all their metadata — some of which the government could then demand using a “specific selection term” related to foreign terrorism. Bill supporters maintain this would prevent indiscriminate collection.

However, the legislation may not end bulk surveillance and in fact could codify the ability of the government to conduct dragnet data collection. “We’re taking something that was not permitted under regular section 215 … and now we’re creating a whole apparatus to provide for it,” Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., said on Tuesday night during a House Rules Committee proceeding. “The language does limit the amount of bulk collection, it doesn’t end bulk collection,” Rep. Amash said, arguing that the problematic “specific selection term” allows for “very large data collection, potentially in the hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even millions.” In a statement posted to Facebook ahead of the vote, Rep. Amash said the legislation “falls woefully short of reining in the mass collection of Americans’ data, and it takes us a step in the wrong direction by specifically authorizing such collection in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.”

“While I appreciate a number of the reforms in the bill and understand the need for secure counter-espionage and terrorism investigations, I believe our nation is better served by allowing Section 215 to expire completely and replacing it with a measure that finds a better balance between national security interests and protecting the civil liberties of Americans,” Congressman Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said in a statement explaining his vote against the bill.

With only days left to act and Rand Paul threatening a filibuster, Senate Republicans remain deeply divided over the future of the PATRIOT Act and have no clear path to keep key government spying authorities from expiring at the end of the month. Crucial parts of the PATRIOT Act, including a provision authorizing the government’s controversial bulk collection of American phone records, first revealed by Edward Snowden, are due to lapse May 31. That means Congress has barely a week to figure out a fix before before lawmakers leave town for Memorial Day recess at the end of the next week. Story Continued Below The prospects of a deal look grim: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday night proposed just a two-month extension of expiring PATRIOT Act provisions to give the two sides more time to negotiate, but even that was immediately dismissed by critics of the program.

The House of Representatives has passed the USA Freedom Act, which represents a significant down payment on broader government surveillance reform. We need as many people as possible speaking up to make sure that the Senate says YES to the USA Freedom Act.

The PATRIOT Act is going to need a miracle to survive the weekend unscathed. Backers of the post-9/11 anti-terror measure are scrambling this week to prevent the law’s key surveillance programs from lapsing at midnight Sunday. But with the Senate not slated to return to Washington until just hours before that deadline, opponents like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) showing no signs of budging, and the House so far unwilling to bail out the upper chamber, the prospects for an eleventh-hour breakthrough look slim.

“Our options are a lot more limited” given the time constraints, said Utah Sen. Mike Lee, the chief Republican backer of the bill in the Senate. “We can either let the provisions at issue expire, or we can pass the House-passed USA Freedom Act.” The problem is that doing anything ahead of the midnight deadline would take the cooperation of all 100 senators. That’s hardly a given since Paul is still insisting that McConnell allow votes on privacy-related amendments, and Wyden has vowed to block any clean extension of what he calls a “bad law.”

n an appearance in Kentucky on Tuesday, McConnell acknowledged the strong support for the USA Freedom Act “makes it pretty challenging to extend the law as it is.” In Washington, top Republican aides could not — or would not — explain how the Senate will escape the fix beyond the possibility that Senate leaders can somehow persuade Paul and Wyden to stop blocking a PATRIOT Act extension with the promise of a robust Senate debate to follow.

t may sound hard to believe, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., isn't always wrong -- at least when he states the obvious: “9/11 is a long time ago,” he said Wednesday, “and it's something that needs to be looked at again.” The “it” is the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution, or AUMF, adopted three days after the terror attacks, and now going on its lucky 13th year. It's been in effect nearly twice as long as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing Vietnam, what was “America's Longest War” -- until the 21st century, that is.

On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress authorized the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and those who “harbored” them. Two successive administrations have since turned the 60 words of the AUMF's operative clause into what journalist Gregory Johnsen calls “the most dangerous sentence in U.S. history” -- a writ for a war without temporal or spatial limits. The last time the Senate held hearings on the AUMF, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked the Pentagon's civilian special operations chief, Michael Sheehan, “does [the president] have the authority to put boots on the ground in the Congo?” Answer: “Yes, sir, he does.” Predictably, the hawkish Graham was totally okay with that. “The battlefield is wherever the enemy chooses to make it,” right? Right, said Sheehan: “from Boston to the [Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan]."

Asked how much longer the war on terrorism will last, Sheehan replied, “at least 10 to 20 years.” So presumably the AUMF can serve as the basis for Chelsea Clinton's “kill list” in 2033, after she trounces George P. Bush. Lyndon Johnson once compared the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to “Grandma’s nightshirt” because “it covers everything.” Even LBJ might have marveled at how the last two administrations have stretched the post-9/11 AUMF. Under the theory that “the United States is a battlefield in the war on terror,” the Bush administration invoked it to justify warrantless wiretapping and military detention of American citizens on American soil. The Obama administration cites it as legal authority for the extrajudicial killing of Americans via remote-control.

Almost before the votes were counted in the recent Greek elections, battle lines were being drawn all over Europe. While Alexis Tsipras, the newly elected Prime Minister from Greece’s victorious Syriza Party, was telling voters, “Greece is leaving behind catastrophic austerity, fear and autocratic government,” Jens Weidmann, president of the German Bundesbank, was warning the new government not to “make promises it cannot keep and the country cannot afford.”   On Feb. 12 those two points of view will collide when European Union (EU) heads of state gather in Brussels. Whether the storm blowing out of Southern Europe proves an irresistible force, or the European Council an immovable object, is not clear, but whatever the outcome, the continent is not likely to be the same after that meeting.   The Jan 25 victory of Greece’s leftwing Syriza Party was, on one hand, a beacon for indebted countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. On the other, it is a gauntlet for Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and the “troika”—the European Central bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—the designers and enforcers of loans and austerity policies that have inflicted a catastrophic economic and social crisis on tens of millions of Europeans.

The troika’s policies were billed as “bailouts” for countries mired in debt—one largely caused by the 2008 financial speculation bubble over which indebted countries had little control—and as a way to restart economic growth. In return for the loans, the EU and the troika demanded massive cutbacks in social services, huge layoffs, privatization of pubic resources, and higher taxes.   However, the “bailouts” did not go toward stimulating economies, but rather to repay creditors, mostly large European banks. Out of the $266 billion loaned to Greece, 89 percent went to investors. After five years under the troika formula, Greece was the most indebted country in Europe. Gross national product dropped 26 percent, unemployment topped 27 percent (and over 50 percent for young people), and one-third of the population lost their health care coverage.   Given a chance to finally vote on the austerity strategy, Greeks overwhelmingly rejected the parties that went along with the troika and elected Syriza.

Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein—now the third largest party in the Irish Republic—hailed the vote as opening “up the real prospect of democratic change, not just for the people of Greece, but for citizens right across the EU.” Unemployment in Ireland is 10.7 percent, and tens of thousands of jobless young people have been forced to emigrate.   The German Social Democrats are generally supportive of the troika, but the Green Party hailed the Syriza victory and Die Linke Party members marched with signs reading, “We start with Greece. We change Europe.”   Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi—who has his own issues with the EU’s rigid approach to debt—hailed the Greek elections, and top aide Sandro Gozi said that Rome was ready to work with Syriza. The jobless rate in Italy is 13.4 percent, but 40 percent among youth.

The first (and thus far only) roll-back of post-9/11 surveillance authorities was implemented over the weekend: The National Security Agency shuttered its program for collecting and holding the metadata of Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. While bulk collection under Section 215 has ended, the government can obtain access to this information under the procedures specified in the USA Freedom Act. Indeed, some experts have argued that the Agency likely has access to more metadata because its earlier dragnet didn’t cover cell phones or Internet calling. In addition, the metadata of calls made by an individual in the United States to someone overseas and vice versa can still be collected in bulk — this takes place abroad under Executive Order 12333. No doubt the NSA wishes that this was the end of the surveillance reform story and the Paris attacks initially gave them an opening. John Brennan, the Director of the CIA, implied that the attacks were somehow related to “hand wringing” about spying and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced a bill to delay the shut down of the 215 program. Opponents of encryption were quick to say: “I told you so.”

But the facts that have emerged thus far tell a different story. It appears that much of the planning took place IRL (that’s “in real life” for those of you who don’t have teenagers). The attackers, several of whom were on law enforcement’s radar, communicated openly over the Internet. If France ever has a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry, it could well conclude that the Paris attacks were a failure of the intelligence agencies rather than a failure of intelligence authorities. Despite the passage of the USA Freedom Act, US surveillance authorities have remained largely intact. Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act — which is the basis of programs like PRISM and the NSA’s Upstream collection of information from Internet cables — sunsets in the summer of 2017. While it’s difficult to predict the political environment that far out, meaningful reform of Section 702 faces significant obstacles. Unlike the Section 215 program, which was clearly aimed at Americans, Section 702 is supposedly targeted at foreigners and only picks up information about Americans “incidentally.” The NSA has refused to provide an estimate of how many Americans’ information it collects under Section 702, despite repeated requests from lawmakers and most recently a large cohort of advocates. The Section 215 program was held illegal by two federal courts (here and here), but civil attempts to challenge Section 702 have run into standing barriers. Finally, while two review panels concluded that the Section 215 program provided little counterterrorism benefit (here and here), they found that the Section 702 program had been useful.

There is, nonetheless, some pressure to narrow the reach of Section 702. The recent decision by the European Court of Justice in the safe harbor case suggests that data flows between Europe and the US may be restricted unless the PRISM program is modified to protect the information of Europeans (see here, here, and here for discussion of the decision and reform options). Pressure from Internet companies whose business is suffering — estimates run to the tune of $35 to 180 billion — as a result of disclosures about NSA spying may also nudge lawmakers towards reform. One of the courts currently considering criminal cases which rely on evidence derived from Section 702 surveillance may hold the program unconstitutional either on the basis of the Fourth Amendment or Article III for the reasons set out in this Brennan Center report. A federal district court in Colorado recently rejected such a challenge, although as explained in Steve’s post, the decision did not seriously explore the issues. Further litigation in the European courts too could have an impact on the debate.

The CIA today released the long-contested Volume V of its official history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which it had successfully concealed until now by claiming that it was a “draft” and could be withheld from the public under the FOIA’s "deliberative process" privilege. The National Security Archive fought the agency for years in court to release the historically significant volume, only to have the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2014 uphold the CIA’s overly-broad interpretation of the "deliberative process" privilege. Special credit for today’s release goes to the champions of the 2016 FOIA amendments, which set a 25-year sunset for the exemption:  Senators John Cornyn, Patrick Leahy, and Chuck Grassley, and Representatives Jason Chaffetz, Elijah Cummings, and Darrell Issa. Chief CIA Historian David Robarge states in the cover letter announcing the document’s release that the agency is “releasing this draft volume today because recent 2016 changes in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires us to release some drafts that are responsive to FOIA requests if they are more than 25 years old.” This improvement – codified by the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 – came directly from the National Security Archive’s years of litigation. The CIA argued in court for years – backed by Department of Justice lawyers – that the release of this volume, written by Agency historian Jack B. Pfeiffer, would “confuse the public.” National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton says, “Now the public gets to decide for itself how confusing the CIA can be.  How many thousands of taxpayer dollars were wasted trying to hide a CIA historian's opinion that the Bay of Pigs aftermath degenerated into a nasty internal power struggle?” Archive senior analyst and Cuba Project Director Peter Kornbluh notes, “We know now why the CIA attempted to cover up this document for so long. It is a vivid historical example of what Pfeiffer called ‘the agency's dirty linen’ that CIA officials never wanted to air in public."

At 4:00 PM today President Barack Obama signed the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 (S. 337) into law. The bipartisan, bicameral bill – introduced by Senators John Cornyn, Chuck Grassley, and Patrick Leahy, and supported by Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings in the House – will improve FOIA in several meaningful ways and reflects many of the findings of the National Security Archive’s FOIA audits and litigation. The legislation mandates a 25-year sunset for the “wildly misused” FOIA exemption (b)(5), an exemption that currently has no time limit and is often called the “withhold it because you want to” exemption. The CIA recently successfully hid a draft history of its 53-year-old Bay of Pigs invasion by invoking an overly-broad interpretation of the exemption. Thanks to President Obama and FOIA lions in the Senate and the House, the new FOIA bill will curtail such senseless secrecy. Agencies are now required to update their FOIA regulations within 180 days after the passage of the bill. A National Security Archive audit shows that too many federal agencies have not updated their regulations to comply with the 2007 Open Government FOIA improvements. By neglecting to update their “FOIA handbooks,” agencies are essentially ignoring Congress’s FOIA reforms.

Today’s signing also codifies the presumption of openness. Archive audits going back to 2009 show that most federal agencies have continued to ignore President Obama’s “presumption of disclosure” guidance that he issued on his first day in office. The new bill codifies this presumption, mirrors the Obama administration’s and the Department of Justice’s (non binding) instructions on FOIA, thereby requiring that records be released unless there is a foreseeable harm or legal requirement to withhold them. The law will also improve public digital access to released records, and strengthen and increase the independence of the FOIA Ombuds Office – the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS). But the bill did not fulfill all of the public's openness asks. It does not include a public interest balancing test to force the release of information which can technically be withheld under the law; it also does not establish a government commission or mechanism which can overturn bad agency FOIA decisions. "This is an important improvement to the US Freedom of Information Act," said Archive director Tom Blanton, "but there are several large leaps the US law still needs to make to catch up with international Freedom of Information norms and standards." The signing of today’s legislation comes just before the law – signed begrudgingly by LBJ on July 4, 1966 – turns 50.

Lawmakers are renewing their calls for an end to a controversial surveillance program that collects data about virtually all American phone calls, citing the newest recommendations from a government privacy board.This newest set of recommendations “spells the final end of the government's bulk collection” of phone call data, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a statement.The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board — tasked with overseeing the country’s surveillance activities — released its first report on the controversial surveillance programs made public by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year.

The board recommended that the government end the phone data program, questioning its efficacy and saying that it “lacks a viable legal foundation” and “raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value.”Last week, President Obama outlined changes he plans to make to the surveillance program, including requiring intelligence agencies to get court approval before accessing the phone data.Critics of the NSA and its phone data program say Obama didn’t go far enough in his speech and are now pointing to the privacy board’s report as evidence that more needs to be done.“The president's recommendations last week did not go far enough to rein in the out-of-control National Security Agency,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who has questioned the intelligence community on whether it spies on officials — said in a statement.

“This report underscores that the collection of records on virtually every phone call made in the United States is an unconstitutional violation of the privacy rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment,” he said, calling on Congress to “pass strong legislation to protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.”Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), co-author of the USA Freedom Act, which would end bulk surveillance programs, said the report highlights the need for congressional action.“The report appropriately calls into question the legality and constitutionality of the program, and underscores the need to change the law to rein in the government’s overbroad interpretation” of its surveillance authority, he said in a statement.Schiff called for congressional action before next year’s sunset of a surveillance-enabling national security law.“Congress will not re-authorize bulk collection of this data when it expires next year, but Congress should not wait for the program to expire on its own,” he said. “Rather we should work to restructure the program now.”

I live in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I can more or less roll out of bed into the House of Representatives or the Senate; the majestic Library of Congress doubles as my local branch. (If you visit, spend a sunset on the steps of the library's Jefferson Building. Trust me.) You can't miss my place, three stories of brick painted Big Bird yellow. It's a charming little corner of the city. Each fall, the trees outside my window shake their leaves and carpet the street in gold. Nora Ephron, if she were alive, might've shot a scene for her latest movie in one of the lush green parks that bookend my block. The neighborhood wasn't always so nice. A few years back, during a reporting trip to China, I met an American consultant who had known Capitol Hill in a darker era. "I was driving up the street one time," he told me, "and walking in the opposite direction was this huge guy carrying an assault rifle. Broad daylight, no one even noticed. That's what kind of neighborhood it was." Nowadays, row houses around me sell for $1 million or more. I rent.

Washington's a fun place to live if you're young and employed. But as a recent Washington Post story pointed out, the nation's capital is slowly pricing out even its yuppies who, in their late-twenties and early-thirties, want to start families but can't afford it. "I hate to say it, but the facts show that the D.C. market is for people who are single and relatively affluent," a real estate researcher told the Post. The District's housing boom just won't stop; off go those new and expecting parents to the suburbs. And we're talking about the lucky ones. Elsewhere in the country, vulnerability in the housing market isn't a trend story; it's the norm. The Cedillo family, as Laura Gottesdiener writes today, went looking for their version of the American housing dream and thought they found it in Chandler, Arizona. They didn't know that the house they chose to rent rested on a shaky foundation -- not physically but financially. It had been one of thousands snapped up and rented out by massive investment firms making a killing in the wake of the housing collapse. As Gottesdiener -- who has put the new rental empires of private equity firms on the map for TomDispatch -- shows, the goal of such companies is to squeeze every dime of profit from their properties, from homes like the Cedillos', and that can lead to tragedy.

Drowning in Profits A Private Equity Firm, a Missing Pool Fence, and the Price of a Child’s Death By Laura Gottesdiener

In a landmark victory for privacy, a federal appeals court ruled unanimously today that the mass phone-records program exposed two years ago by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is illegal because it goes far beyond what Congress ever intended to permit when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The ruling in ACLU v. Clapper is enormously significant, and not only because the program in question — the first to be revealed by Edward Snowden — is at the heart of a legislative reform effort playing out right now, or because it sparked the most significant debate about government surveillance in decades. The decision could also affect many other laws the government has stretched to the breaking point in order to justify dragnet collection of Americans’ sensitive information. Under the program, revealed in the Guardian on June 5, 2013, telecommunications companies hand over to the NSA, on a daily basis, records relating to the calls of all of their customers. Those records include information about who called whom, when, and for how long. The ACLU sued the NSA over the program just days after it was revealed, and we took the case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals after it was dismissed by a district court.

A few points on what makes the decision so important. 1. It recognizes that Section 215 of the Patriot Act does not authorize the government to collect information on such a massive scale.

2. The decision’s significance extends far beyond the phone records program alone. It implicates other mass spying programs that we have learned about in the past two years and — almost certainly ­— others that the government continues to conceal from the public. For example, we know that the Drug Enforcement Administration, for decades, employed a similar definition of “relevance” to amass logs of every call made from the United States to as many as 116 different countries. The same theory was also used to justify the collection of email metadata. Both those programs have been discontinued, but the legal reasoning hasn’t, and it could very well be the basis for programs the government has never acknowledged to the public, including the CIA’s bulk collection of Americans’ financial records.

In an ornate room on the first floor of the Capitol, some of the most liberal members of Congress met for lunch on Thursday with nearly a dozen stalwart conservatives who’ve repeatedly taken on their own leadership for being too soft. The agenda consisted of a single topic, perhaps the only one that would bring together such ideologically divergent politicians in Washington at this moment: their shared disdain for the PATRIOT Act.

Several of the most extremist provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act are going to expire on June 1 unless Congress reauthorizes them in some form. Obama officials such as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and new Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been engaged in rank fear-mongering to coerce renewal, warning that we’ll all be “less safe” if these provisions are allowed to “sunset” as originally intended, while invoking classic Cheneyite rhetoric by saying Patriot Act opponents will bear the blame for the next attack. In an interview yesterday with the Intercept, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer explained why those scare tactics are outright frivolous. Enter the New York Times. An article this morning by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, in the first paragraph, cites anonymous Obama officials warning that “failing to [strike a deal by the deadline] would suspend crucial domestic surveillance authority at a time of mounting terrorism threats.” Behold the next two paragraphs:

“What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing national security Russian roulette,” one senior administration official said of allowing the powers to lapse. That prospect appears increasingly likely with the measure, the USA Freedom Act, stalled and lawmakers in their home states and districts during a congressional recess. “We’re in uncharted waters,” another senior member of the administration said at a briefing organized by the White House, where three officials spoke with reporters about the consequences of inaction by Congress. “We have not had to confront addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities, and it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk.”

Those two paragraphs, courtesy of the Obama White House and the Paper of Record, have it all: the principal weapons that have poisoned post-9/11 political discourse in the U.S.