Snooping Section Of US PATRIOT Act Has Expired. Now What?

As the US Senate failed to renew the mass surveillance section of the US Patriot act, as of less than an hour ago, it has formally expired. This means that the US NSA, according to their own measures, are no longer authorized to do mass surveillance. What now?

Tonight, the infamous Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the NSA has been using to justify its mass blanket surveillance, expired. It came with so-called “sunset provisions” that meant it would automatically expire unless actively renewed. That happened – or rather, did not happen – last night. The law is no longer in effect.

However, as pointed out earlier, the NSA has been blanket wiretapping phonecalls since at least 1976, so it’s unclear how much they really depend on a law from 2001. This needs to be seen for the political victory that it is, rather than as an event causing the endgame change.

It’s also important to remember that most of these laws only outlaw spying on a country’s own citizens, while other laws encourage spying on the citizens of other countries. Most of the Congressional hearings about the NSA have concerned whether the surveillance agency is “spying on Americans”. When this happens, it’s vitally important to remember that Human Rights are called that for a reason. It’s not Americans’ Rights to the NSA, it’s not British Rights to the GCHQ. Privacy is a human right, and it applies to all humans regardless of nationality.

Surveillance agencies have been trying to get political support all over the globe by saying they’re not spying on the citizens of their own countries (even though they have been, and are). But it matters little in the end, for they all share data with each other: The US NSA spies on Canadian citizens, the Canadian CSEC spies on US citizens, and then they pool all their data. Add the British GCHQ, the Australian ASIO, the Swedish FRA, et cetera.

There’s no reason at this point to expect surveillance agencies to stop spying on each others’ countries and sharing the data with each other in order to circumvent basic human rights constitutions and provisions. Tonight’s victory was more a political than a practical one. Nevertheless, it was still an important one.

Getting the US Congress to do absolutely nothing about mass surveillance may not seem like much of a victory, but it’s the best we’ve gotten so far. And this time, that resulted in the expiration of some very nasty code of law.

Surveillance hawks are mobilizing to reinstate the NSA’s surveillance powers that violate human rights. Maybe they will succeed, maybe they won’t. Maybe hawks in other countries will succeed, maybe they won’t. But tonight marks something as unusual as a “temporary” human rights violation law that turned out, in the end, to be just that: temporary. That’s a rare, but very welcome, exception to the pattern.

Tonight was a victory that marked where the popular support lies, ahead of the US Presidential Elections, and that was with outrage against the spying machine. When you win the popular support, you’re winning the long-term game.

This isn’t over. But with tonight’s victory, the outlook is getting slightly better.

In the meantime, privacy remains your own responsibility.