Policy Statement of the Civil Liberties Committee: Limits on NSA Surveillance of Americans should be Retained or Strengthened

Policy Statements

After Edward Snowden leaked classified memos that disclosed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been been gathering bulk telephone metadata on Americans (such as phone numbers called and the dates and times), Congress enacted the USA Freedom Act of 2015 (H.R. 2048, Pub.L. 114–23). That act limits the collection of such data. Those limits (contained in Section 215 of the Patriot Act, as amended) expire on December 15, 2019, but the White House has proposed that Congress reauthorize and make permanent NSA’s authority to conduct massive surveillance of records of Americans’ domestic telephone calls and texts. 

In 2014, the Chicago Council of Lawyers (Council) recommended that NSA should be required to obtain prior approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain limited metadata related to a particular telephone number. The Council concluded that NSA’s gathering of telephone metadata on millions of Americans’ phone calls was a massive and illegal invasion of privacy and that the data had not been critical in thwarting terrorist attacks.

As a result, the Civil Liberties Committee of the Chicago Council of Lawyers recommends that Congress not reauthorize NSA to gather vast amounts of metadata on the phone calls of Americans, and that the existing limits contained in the USA Freedom Act of 2015 be retained or strengthened.