Senator Coons makes waves on privacy protection

Thursday wasn't the first time Senator Coons came out swinging to protect Americans' right to privacy, but the day certainly highlighted Chris' reputation as one of the Senate's emerging privacy leaders.

The first moment came during the Senate Judiciary Committee's debate over several amendments to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act Sunset Extensions Act. (Seriously, that's what the bill is called.)

Quick background: FISA was passed in 1978 after President Nixon was found to have used federal intelligence resources to spy on political enemies. It defined the role of the courts and of Congress in setting parameters for use of those spy tools. Fast forward to post-9/11 2001, when the PATRIOT Act expanded FISA to include the new threat of non-state-sponsored terrorism. Those powers were expanded again in 2007, when Congress removed the requirement of a court-issued warrant for the government to surveil foreign intelligence targets in the United States. Abuses of these new powers during the Bush Administration resulted in the FISA Amendments Act in 2008. That law is scheduled to expire ("sunset") in 2012, and the Senate is now considering legislation to extend it, either to 2015 or 2017 (depending on which version passes).

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), with whom Senator Coons rarely agrees, proposed an amendment that would have prohibited the U.S. government from using communications obtained through wiretaps and foreign intelligence operations to search for information on U.S. citizens without a warrant. Put another way, let's say you're an American citizen your name happens to appear in records the intelligence community collected while surveilling a suspected terrorist. You're not suspected of terrorism, but for some reason, you're name is dragged into it. This measure would prevent the government from searching for your name and using what it found against you without a court order.

"The FISA Amendments Act is an important and valuable law for our national security," Senator Coons said. "But its use needs to be watched closely to prevent abuses like the ones we saw in 2008."

Senator Coons voted for Senator Lee's amendment. As did Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), but they were the only three to vote for this privacy-protection measure, and the amendment failed, 15-3.

The second moment Thursday came as the Senate was winding down for the week. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have been working on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 for quite some time, and after studying it earlier this year, Senator Coons determined it lacked the privacy protections a bill of this importance should have.

He was determined not to let Congress repeat some of the mistakes of the previous decade, when it dramatically expanded the government's power to spy on U.S. citizens, but didn't include sufficient protections for Americans' privacy.

"For months," Senator Coons said, "I have worked with several of my colleagues on language that strikes a better balance between than what was proposed in earlier drafts of the legislation, which would have enabled greater information sharing, but at too significant a cost to personal privacy. Senators Lieberman and Collins have worked with us with in earnest to find a better balance, and with the version introduced today, S.3414, I believe we have found it."

The new version of the legislation features an array of improvements for which Senator Coons appealed, centering on the information-sharing provisions under Title VII of the bill. The result is a stronger version of the Cybersecurity Act, and a significantly stronger bill than the House-supported CISPA.

For a first-term freshman, Senator Coons is certainly starting to show he deserves a seat at the table on the most complex privacy issues facing our nation. Thursday was evidence of that.