{"id":79379,"date":"2017-01-19T11:40:22","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T16:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/?post_type=blog&p=79379"},"modified":"2021-01-27T21:50:32","modified_gmt":"2021-01-28T02:50:32","slug":"sessions-on-surveillance-confirmation-hearing-confirms-concerns","status":"publish","type":"insight","link":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/insights\/sessions-on-surveillance-confirmation-hearing-confirms-concerns\/","title":{"rendered":"Sessions on Surveillance: Confirmation Hearing Confirms Concerns"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Senate will soon vote on President-elect Trump\u2019s nominee for U.S. Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions. Last week, CDT and 14 other organizations sent a letter<\/a> to the Senate Judiciary Committee raising serious concerns about Sessions\u2019 record on surveillance and privacy. Last week\u2019s hearings<\/a> confirmed some of our concerns and left us with more questions than answers about how Sessions would protect Americans\u2019 privacy and civil liberties as Attorney General.<\/p>\n

Bulk collection of Americans\u2019 communications records<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a Senator, Sessions opposed the USA Freedom Act and was an ardent supporter of the NSA\u2019s bulk collection program under Section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, despite consistent evidence that the program never discovered or disrupted a terrorist plot. The USA Freedom Act ended the NSA\u2019s bulk collection of Americans\u2019 phone records and drew broad support from the Intelligence Community. However, at his confirmation hearing, Sessions would not admit that the USA Freedom Act bars the NSA from engaging in bulk collection of Americans\u2019 phone records. When Senator Leahy asked Sessions to \u201cagree . . . that [the executive branch] cannot reinstate the bulk collection of Americans\u2019 phone records without amending federal statutes[,]\u201d Sessions responded, \u201cI can\u2019t swear that that\u2019s absolutely, totally, always true, but it appears to be so.\u201d  The most Leahy was able to extract was a commitment by Sessions to uphold the USA Freedom Act<\/a>, but not a belief that the Act ends bulk collection, which was the overall purpose of the legislation.<\/p>\n

Sessions\u2019 answers during the hearing suggest a desire to leave the door open for bulk collection of Americans\u2019 communications. As CDT has argued<\/a>, this type of dragnet collection can reveal our most sensitive communications and activities and chills associational freedom.<\/p>\n

Freedom of the press<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sessions would not commit to following the Department of Justice standards for subpoenaing journalists, confirming our concern that a Sessions DOJ may conduct unnecessary or overly broad investigations of the news media.<\/p>\n

Senator Klobuchar asked Sessions to commit to following the DOJ\u2019s revised guidelines<\/a> limiting the circumstances in which the news media can be subpoenaed, requiring high-level approval for news media subpoenas, and strengthening the presumption of notice to journalists who are the subject of a subpoena. Sessions said he had \u201cnot studied\u201d the revised guidelines and was \u201cnot sure\u201d if he could commit to following them, adding that \u201cthe Department of Justice does have sensitivity to this issue.\u201d Sessions was a strong opponent of the Free Flow of Information Act<\/a>, a bill that would have protected journalists from being forced to testify about their confidential sources.<\/p>\n

Sessions admitted that there is a \u201cbroadly recognized and proper deference to the news media,\u201d but said that \u201cyou could have a situation in which [the] media is not really the unbiased media we see today, and they could be a mechanism through which unlawful intelligence is obtained.\u201d Strong limits and checks on news media investigations are necessary to protect the free and independent press. As Senator Klobuchar noted, the press performs an important watchdog function on which our democracy depends.<\/p>\n

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote on Sessions\u2019 nomination on January 24. Senator Leahy has submitted and publicly released follow-up questions<\/a>, which cover the DOJ guidelines for news-media subpoenas, the use of cell-site simulators for warrantless location tracking, and encryption, among other issues. CDT urges the committee to carefully scrutinize Senator Sessions\u2019 answers to follow-up questions as well as his existing record on privacy, as outlined in our coalition letter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","content_type":[7251],"area-of-focus":[77,806,799],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insight\/79379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insight"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/insight"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insight\/79379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"content_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content_type?post=79379"},{"taxonomy":"area-of-focus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cdt.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/area-of-focus?post=79379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}