Due to the actions of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the National Security Agency is no longer allowed to spy on American’s phone calls and are no longer allowed to collect bulk phone data.
The action is considered temporary as eventually Senator Paul will not be able to stop passage of legislation that would allow certain spy programs to continue. The current Patriot Act had a Sunday night deadline to be renewed or all the spy programs approved by the law had to immediately end.
Several Republican senators were upset with their colleague stopping the law.
“We cannot go back to a pre-9/11 mentality,” New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte told Fox News.
“The Senate took an important–if late–step forward tonight,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement after the Senate moved forward with debate on the Act. “We call on the Senate to ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible.”
Officials with the NSA told CNN they officially shut down the program at 7:44 p.m. Sunday night ahead of the Senate’s inaction on the bill.
The Senate is waiting to vote on the USA Freedom Act, which makes big changes to the NSA’s ability to collect phone data but keeps other parts of the Patriot Act’s spying authorization attacks.
“There comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer.”
With those words, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul took to the Senate floor for an eleven hour unofficial filibuster to call out the dangers of the Patriot Act’s allowing the NSA to collect information about the phone calls of all Americans.
It marked the second time Paul had used the filibuster to bring attention to what he feels are the NSA’s illegal methods for collecting information on Americans.
The Patriot Act allows the government to collect “metadata” of every call made on American phones. While the government does not collect the actual content of the calls, the government knows who is on the phone calls and can track who an American is speaking with and for how long they speak.
The sections of the Patriot Act that allow for the bulk collection of the data expires on June 1 and while Republicans leaders in the Senate want to allow it to continue, the Senate is voting on a House-passed bill that removes the NSA authorization to collect bulk data versus a system that will allow surveillance only if a judge approves a specific request.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on whether to allow the bulk collection of American’s phone records to continue before Memorial Day.