Surveillance Reform
On June 29, Senator Patrick Leahy, (VT-D) chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced the USA FREEDOM Act of 2014, an updated version of a surveillance reform bill he introduced last year. The new measure would ban bulk collection of U.S. citizen phone records and Internet data and limit the amount of information the National Security Agency (NSA) can access for a search. It would also require the government to issue much narrower record requests. If passed, the bill would represent the first major surveillance overhaul since passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which put an oversight structure in…
