Surveillance Transparency

Four Members of Congress join OpenTheGovernment.org and Other Groups In Seeking End to Secret Legal Interpretations of Executive Order 12333

OpenTheGovernment.org, four members of Congress, and over forty other civil society organizations wrote to President Obama and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) asking for a thorough investigation of the NSA’s surveillance under Executive Order 12333. The letter, organized by Access, states in part:

09/03/2014

Partners Respond to Leahy’s USA Freedom Act

The USA Freedom Act passed by the House was largely stripped of transparency provisions and meaningful privacy protections. The bill introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy greatly improves on that bill, including essential reporting requirements and responding to many privacy concerns. Twenty groups joined OTG’s letter supporting the Leahy’s transparency improvements.

08/06/2014

ODNI’s Transparency Report: What It Tells Us, and What it Doesn’t

The following is cross-posted from The Classified Section, OpenTheGovernment.org's new blog on national security secrecy.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released some statistics on its use of surveillance authorities, fulfilling a promise made last August 30 and reiterated in the White House’s Open Government National Action Plan in December. (They are also essentially the same statistics that the House-passed version of the USA FREEDOM Act requires the DNI to publish—a sign of the extent to which the intelligence community rewrote that bill before it passed the House.)

06/30/2014

Groups Urge White House to End Bulk Telephony Metadata Program

Twenty-six groups joined the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) to urge President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to not renew the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program.

06/24/2014

Coalition Asks Senate to Fix USA FREEDOM

OpenTheGovernment.org and a large coalition of civil society groups wrote yesterday in a letter to the United States Senate that “unless the version of the USA FREEDOM Act that the Senate considers contains substantial improvements over the House-passed version, we will be forced to oppose the bill.”

06/19/2014

Fight for Transparency in Surveillance Reform Moves to the Senate

Now that the House has passed its version of a bill to reform our nation’s surveillance programs, OTG and our partners will be working to make sure that any similar legislation passed by the Senate includes much stronger transparency provisions. As we have written, the House opted to severely weaken reporting requirements in the original Sensenbrenner-Leahy proposal that would have given the public a reasonable understanding of the scope of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs. HR 3361 replaced them instead with potentially misleading reporting requirements that would likely allow vastly understating the scope of communications acquired or reviewed by the NSA.

06/10/2014

The Snowden Leaks One Year Later: OTG and Partners Reflect

The Snowden revelations have brought dozens of revelations to light about the breadth and legality of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. In a Roll Call op-ed published today, Executive Director Patrice McDermott notes that while the public now knows much more about these programs, the reform efforts that are taking shape in Congress threaten to continue to leave the public in the dark.

06/05/2014

CNSS Makes First Push Against Surveillance in FISA Court

The Center for National Security Studies (CNSS) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in April, challenging the constitutionality of bulk data collection. CNSS’ amicus is the first time a formal challenge by a non-government entity has been permitted in the FISA Court.

05/27/2014

House Passes Hollowed-Out Version of USA FREEDOM Act

Last week, OpenTheGovernment.org and thirteen other organizations wrote to the House leadership and asked them to restore the government transparency provisions of the original USA FREEDOM Act in order to “to verify that the NSA actually ends bulk collection instead of finding new loopholes to exploit.” Instead, House leadership engaged in closed-door negotiations with the intelligence community, and introduced new loopholes into the bill’s priv

05/22/2014

Groups Urge Restoration of USA Freedom Act Transparency Provisions

OpenTheGovernment.org and thirteen other organizations wrote to the House and Senate leadership yesterday, asking them to restore the USA FREEDOM Act’s government transparency provisions before final passage of the bill. The letter concludes, “[w]e recognize that some compromises were necessary to move any surveillance bill to the floor. But they increase the importance of restoring the transparency provisions of the original USA FREEDOM Act, to verify that the NSA actually ends bulk collection instead of finding new loopholes to exploit.

05/15/2014

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