Holt on New NSA Report: "Mass Surveillance of Americans Must End"
Press Release
(West Windsor, NJ) -- Rep. Rush Holt (NJ-12), the former chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel who coauthored legislation in 2004 and 2007 that established the congressionally chartered Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), issued the following statement on the release of the PCLOB report on the NSA's domestic surveillance programs:
"Now a congressionally chartered panel, a White House panel, and a federal judge all agree: Mass surveillance of Americans must end.
"These programs are unconstitutional and demonstrably ineffective. We must not live in a society in which the government treats Americans as suspects first and citizens second."
The new report from the PCLOB determined, "The Section 215 bulk telephone records program lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value. As a result, the Board recommends that the government end the program."
In December 2013, the White House's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies stated in its report that " as a general rule and without senior policy review, the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information about U.S. person for the purpose of enabling future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes."
Also in December 2013, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, issued an order finding that the NSA's mass surveillance programs are unconstitutional. "I cannot imagine a more "indiscriminate' and "arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," he wrote. "Surely, such a program infringes on "that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment."
Holt has introduced the Surveillance State Repeal Act, H.R. 2818, which would repeal the laws that the White House has cited as providing legal authority for the NSA's mass domestic surveillance programs
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