Rand Paul: What You Discuss on Your Phone Is None of the Government’s Business

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has an op-ed in Time magazine about how the recent court ruling on the NSA’s illegal metadata collection. The full thing is worth a read here.

The three judge panel slams the overreach of the NSA’s limitless metadata collection and privacy intrusion, writing in the opinion that the program was an “unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans.” The court judges the program’s premise as ineffectual, stating “the records demanded are all-encompassing; the government does not even suggest that all of the records sought, or even necessarily any of them, are relevant.”

This is an important victory for privacy, but the fight for liberty must continue in the Supreme Court and Congress until this grave miscarriage of justice is completely repealed.

The current ruling concludes that Section 215 of the Patriot Act does not authorize bulk collection of phone records. While this is great news, it also raises an important question. One of the reforms being offered in Congress is the USA Freedom Act, which bans bulk collection but replaces that collection with a new authorization for collection from phone companies.

Now that the appellate court has ruled that Section 215 doesn’t authorize bulk collection, would the USA Freedom Act actually be expanding the Patriot Act?

That would be a bitter irony if the attempt to end bulk collection actually gave new authority to the Patriot Act to collect records.