Former senator Russ Feingold. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Russ Feingold is no longer in the US Senate.
And that is unfortunate.
No one took more seriously the duty to defend privacy rights than the civil libertarian senator from Wisconsin, who served for the better part of two decades as the essential member of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- and who cast the only Senate vote against the Patriot Act because of the threat he recognized to the guarantees outlined in the Fourth Amendment.
But with the report by The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald that the NSA has been tracking every call by Verizon business customers, it is important to recognize that there are a few new Feingolds in the Senate.
How many remains to be seen. But the congressional response to the latest revelation is vital, as past failures by the House and Senate to provide proper oversight has left the Fourth Amendment at best vulnerable and at worst shredded.
Some senators think that's acceptable. Indeed, Senator Lindsay Graham, R-SC, has declared himself "glad" that the National Security Agency is obtaining the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. And key Democrats, such as Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-California, have adopted a "what's-the-big-deal?" stance that says the spying is old news that senators should have been aware of.
But some of the sharpest and most engaged members of the chamber are rejecting that assessment. Among those stepping up today were Democrats and Republicans who have histories of expressing concern about abuses of privacy rights.
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Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who has led the fight to declassify secret rulings by so-called FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts, had precisely the right response to the report that the National Security Agency (NSA) is engaging in massive, secret bulk data collection of Americans' phone records.
"This type of secret bulk data collection is an outrageous breach of Americans' privacy. I have had significant concerns about the intelligence community over-collecting information about Americans' telephone calls, emails, and other records and that is why I voted against the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act provisions in 2011 and the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act just six months ago," says Merkley. "This bulk data collection is being done under interpretations of the law that have been kept secret from the public. Significant FISA court opinions that determine the scope of our laws should be declassified. Can the FBI or the NSA really claim that they need data scooped up on tens of millions of Americans?"
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who voted against the Patriot Act as a member of the House, made no bones about his objections to Obama-era extensions of a domestic surveillance program that has swept up millions of telephone records on calls by Americans who were not suspected of any wrongdoing.
"The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about. Congress must address this issue and protect the constitutional rights of the American people," said Sanders. "While we must aggressively pursue international terrorists and all of those who would do us harm, we must do it in a way that protects the Constitution and the civil liberties which make us proud to be Americans."
The senator cut the current administration no slack. But he put the broad debate over the NSA phone sweeps -- which Senate Intelligence Committee leaders say have been going on since 2007 -- in perspective.
"As one of the few members of Congress who consistently voted against the Patriot Act, I expressed concern at the time of passage that it gave the government far too much power to spy on innocent United State citizens and provided for very little oversight or disclosure," said Sanders. "Unfortunately, what I said turned out to be exactly true."
Their expressions of concern have been echoed by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who termed the NSA activities an "astounding assault on the Constitution."
