Sen. Patrick Leahy says he's optimistic that his plan to curtail the Obama Administration's electronic surveillance program will be approved by Congress in the coming weeks.
Unless Congress acts by the end of this month, the Patriot Act will expire. Included in the legislation is something known as Section 215. This provision gives the Obama Administration the authority to collect hundreds of millions of phone records in an effort to thwart a future terrorist attack.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has introduced a bill that would reauthorize the entire Patriot Act for the next 5 years.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary committee, opposes a blanket renewal. "I disagree with him and just giving a blank check,” says Leahy. “I don't care if [it’s] a Democratic administration or a Republican administration – I'm not giving a blank check to anybody."
Instead, Leahy is the lead sponsor of a bill that prohibits the federal government from collecting phone records. Individual phone companies would retain these records, and in order to access them, the government would have to convince a special federal intelligence court, that there's a clear link to terrorists. "The idea that any administration … can scoop every single call we're making, can have that kind of ability to spy on every single citizen, whether they're suspected of a crime or not, I think is wrong,” says the senator.
"The idea that any administration ... can scoop every single call we're making, can have that kind of ability to spy on every single citizen, whether they're suspected of a crime or not, I think is wrong." - Sen. Patrick Leahy
Leahy has been able to build a coalition of some of the Senate's most liberal and most conservative members to support his plan. He says there is no doubt in his mind that this surveillance program will eventually be abused unless efforts are made now to restrict government access. “My bottom line is we are less safe as a nation if we have a government that can spy on every single one of us,” he says. “You know that there is going to be abuse; you know that eventually there will be."
The senator says he's hopeful that his legislation will win Senate approval in the near future and he's encouraged that a similar bill has been supported by Republican leaders in the U.S. House.
