Sensenbrenner bill will outlaw collection of phone metadata

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who is considered by some to be the father of the Patriot Act, will soon introduce legislation that will expressly forbid the NSA from collecting telecom metadata. Senator Pat Leahy will introduce similar legislation in the Senate. The beauty of this legislation is that it cuts out hardliners such as Senators Lindsey Graham and Dianne Feinstein, Congressmen Peter King, and Mike Rogers. Sensenbrenner chairs the House Judiciary Committee, Leahy chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee both will introduce their bill in their respective committees, bypassing the intelligence committees of both houses.
The bill will be more restrictive than Congressman Justin Amash's attempt to cut off funding for the collection metadata. It reverse the FISA court's interpretation of one point of law by requiring the court to find before issuing a subpoena. As the Congressman says,
"Having the three qualifications would make it very clear that they have to find out who a bad person is first, get the FISA order, and then see who that bad person was contacting to get the information rather than find the needle in a very large haystack, which is what the metadata was."
"We had thought that the 2006 amendment, by putting the word 'relevant' in, was narrowing what the NSA could collect. Instead, the NSA convinced the FISA court that the relevance clause was an expansive rather than contractive standard, and that's what brought about the metadata collection, which amounts to trillions of phone calls."
The legislation would force the FISA court to disclose surveillance policies, create a special court advocate to represent privacy interests, and to allow companies to disclose how many requests for users' information they receive from the NSA. The bill also tightens up language governing overseas surveillance to remove a loophole which it has been abused to target internet and email activities of Americans through PRISM and like programs.
The Sensenbrenner version of the bill also calls for the prosecution of national security director James Clapper for perjury. More.