The USA PATRIOT Act represents one of the most defensive motives of the Congress regarding terrorism aided by telecommunications. Despite the controversy, section 215 of the PATRIOT Act has played a substantial role in enhancing citizens’ constitutional rights. However, the section should be retired without reconsideration since it provisions the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to allow for government overreach and abuse. While section 215 is seemingly innocuous, the problem is with the few underlying reforms that have resulted in the bill being been shot down a couple of times by Congress.
Ideally, extending the section without addressing key concerns with ‘Roving Wiretaps’ could easily mandate organs such as the federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to justify malevolent security breaches on personal communications. With strategic organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) expressing doubt on state machinery’s willingness to commit to civil liberties and civilian privacy concerns, reauthorizing the bill will surely add obscurity to Congress’ capacity to represent citizens’ interests (McKinney, 2020). That said, section 215 of the PATRIOT Act direly deserves a sunset on account of its obscurity with implementation.
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Another reason for the retirement of section 215 of the PATRIOT Act is the recent invasions on state organs’ private data on its account. In 2015, the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a nationwide bulk collection of phone records, which was then declared wrong later in the year by the Congress (Laperruque, 2020). However, due to the limitations of the section, Congress reinstated a modified form of the program dubbed “call detail records program.” The new program continued mass collection of personal data, with the provision to obtain all relevant data about a target and their contacts.
In conclusion, as much as section 215 of the PATRIOT Act was enacted to secure the country against internal and external cybersecurity threats, there is no more need to sustain it. The landmark legislation should be allowed to sunset. Else, several contentious provisions in the section could easily be manipulated to exert undue surveillance on persons of interest.
References
Laperruque, J. (2020, February 11). Project on Government Oversight. “ What to Expect for the PATRIOT Act Reauthorization.” Washington: POGO Press.
McKinney, I. (2020, March 18). “Enough is Enough—Let it Expire.” Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved https://www.eff.org/Enough-is-enough-let-215-expire
