More than two-dozen organizations signed a letter sent Wednesday to the leaders of the House Judiciary Committee urging lawmakers to open a closed-door hearing next week that will center around the government’s ability to conduct online surveillance.
The House panel is scheduled to discuss Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act at a hearing Tuesday, but the meeting is classified and will be open to members of Congress only.
The decision rankled civil liberties groups and other organizations, which sent the letter to ranking committee members Bob Goodlatte, Virginia Republican, and John Conyers, Michigan Democrat, asking them to reconsider.
“We were surprised when we recently learned that you may soon hold a hearing in a classified format, outside of public view,” reads an excerpt from the letter, which was signed by 26 groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch. “[I]t continues the excessive secrecy that has contributed to the surveillance abuses we have seen in recent years and to their adverse effects upon both our civil liberties and economic growth.”
Passed in 2008, the FISA Amendments Act established new powers for the government by expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the federal law that gives investigators the go-ahead to conduct surveillance on non-U.S. citizen.
Specifically, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows the National Security Agency to monitor the online activities of foreign persons, the scope of which was exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.
Critics of Section 702 fear that any congressional review regarding the law must be done openly and transparently to ensure that the government doesn’t authorize any new eavesdropping abilities for itself, especially after the Snowden’s leaks revealed the extent of NSA surveillance.
“In today’s global communications environment, disclosures of information about how Section 702 operates have confirmed the validity of many of the public’s and civil society’s concerns that this statute implicates the privacy rights of millions of people in the U.S. and around the world who communicate with friends and colleagues abroad, including human rights activists who rely on secure communications for their safety,” the letter read. “The way Section 702 is utilized also affects journalists who interact with confidential sources to report on issues in the public interest, and criminal defendants whose prosecutions may involve the use of evidence derived from intelligence surveillance.”
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