After 9/11, the Bush government gave itself draconian powers to snoop on its citizens. At the time, the public mood in America backed the emergency measure, but after 14 years, there is deep unease with the growing misuse of these powers. Many in the US only discovered how grossly the government abused its powers when Edward Snowden leaked millions of emails that the government had been hoarding.
This deep concern has been successfully exploited by the libertarian Republican Senator Rand Paul, who is standing for president. This week, he blocked the renewal of parts of the Patriot Act, which means since yesterday morning, the National Security Agency is not allowed to collect logs of Americans’ phone calls in bulk; nor can the FBI use the Patriot Act to obtain a variety of wiretap orders, or seek court orders to obtain business records.
Libertarian Republicans like Paul combined with the Democrats to stop the roll-over of these powers by a vote of 77 to 17, which has infuriated the right-wing militants of Paul’s own party, like Senator John McCain. The split within the Republicans points to a poisonous primary campaign as the extreme libertarians fight with the extreme right, squeezing out any old-style centrists. This public fight for the soul of the Republican Party must delight Hilary Clinton and other Democrats.
But the Senate was right to catch the public mood. There is a genuine wave of concern over abuse by the sprawling United Nations security agencies. But the new limitations on snooping may not be as dramatic as they may seem. The government has already sought to ‘grandfather’ new snooping on existing investigations and it may order the communication companies to keep the records and then give itself access to these records. It will be hard to wean the agencies of their addiction to spying on their citizens, but a better route is to stop mass collection of data and focus on what is deemed important by a judge.
