The Patriot Act expired Sunday night at midnight, making it illegal for the National Security Administration to collect and store much of personal telephone and online information they have been collecting since 2001. The Wisconsin Congressman that wrote it is glad to see it expire.
Wisconsin Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner says Americans have been telling Congress for years it’s time to reign in the nation’s surveillance systems. He says the Patriot act was never intended to allow data mining. Sensenbrenner authored both the original Patriot Act and the proposed replacement, the Freedom Act. He says under the Freedom Act, if passed, phone calls would be protected but some other communications would not. Sensenbrenner says, “Phone conversations require a court order, however the emails, the text, the Facebook posts, the Twitter feeds, and things like that do not require a court order.”
There are still differences between the House and Senate versions of the Freedom Act. If the bill becomes law, the NSA will resume gathering the phone records for a period of six months in the House version, or a year in the Senate version. If the bill fails as is, the data collection cannot resume at all.
Sensenbrenner commented on the Freedom Act and the Patriot Act on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Network TV show.
