July/August 2015 401 C&RL News

Emily Sheketoff is executive director of the ALA 
Washington Office, email: esheketoff@alawash.org

W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n eEmily Sheketoff

USA FREEDOM Act of 2015 passes
With the revelations of government surveil-
lance activities of the last several years in 
particular, first by The New York Times and 
then Edward Snowden, many believed that 
real reform might finally be achieved in the 
last Congress by passing the USA FREEDOM 
Act of 2014.  But they were wrong.

In May 2014, the House passed a version 
of the USA FREEDOM Act (H.R. 3361) that 
was dramatically weakened from a civil lib-
erties point of view in the House Judiciary 
Committee and then stripped of virtually all 
meaningful privacy-restoring reforms by the 
full House of Representatives. While strenu-
ous efforts were made to bring a robust ver-
sion of the bill (S. 2685) to the floor of the 
Senate, Republican members filibustered that 
bill and the 113th Congress ended without 
further action once again on any reform of 
the USA PATRIOT Act.

Undeterred, the bill’s bipartisan sponsors 
in both chambers reintroduced the USA 
FREEDOM Act of 2015 (H.R. 2048). This 
was a tenuously calibrated agreement that 
garnered the support of both many civil 
liberties organizations, including ALA, as 
well as congressional “surveillance hawks,” 
the nation’s intelligence agencies, and the 
Obama Administration. On May 14, just one 
week after a federal appeals court ruled that 
the National Security Agency’s (NSA) use of 
Section 215 to collect Americans’ telephone 
call records in bulk was illegal, H.R. 2048 
passed the House with a strongly bipartisan 
vote  (338 yeas to 88 nays). 

On June 2, the Senate passed by a vote 
of 67 to 32, and the President signed the 
USA FREEDOM Act of 2015. It effectively 
precludes the future use of Section 215 (the 
“library provision”) of the USA PATRIOT Act 

for the bulk collection of telephone call data 
and other business records, including library 
patron information.

It also for the first time enacts multiple 
reforms to facilitate the effective challenge of 
gag orders accompanying NSA letters; more 
meaningfully inform the press and public as 
to how often the government is requesting 
information under Section 215; and, for the 
first time, enable appointed pro-civil liber-
ties arguments to be made by fully informed 
advocates before the secret “FISA” Court in 
select key cases. 

H.R. 2048 will go into effect in early 
December.  

Lobbying and grassroots advocacy on 
both privacy- and cybersecurity-related is-
sues by ALA is anticipated for the indefinite 
future. While a symbolically important and 
substantively meaningful victory, the USA 
FREEDOM Act begins some reforms to a 
single statute. Other portions of the USA 
PATRIOT Act, and of many other statutes 
pertaining to both foreign (FISA) and do-
mestic (ECPA) surveillance, also require 
major reform.

Finally, and crucially, ALA and its allies 
have long been and remain fully committed 
to working for the most profound reform of 
all of the nation’s privacy and surveillance 
laws possible. ALA regarded passing the USA 
FREEDOM Act of 2015 as a critical step— the 
first possible in 14 years—to make real prog-
ress toward that much broader permanent 
goal, but as only a step.

Work will continue to pass comprehen-
sive reform of the badly outdated Electronic 
Communications Privacy Act and to restore 
Americans’ civil liberties still compromised 
by, for example, other portions of the USA 
PATRIOT Act, Section 702 of the Foreign In-
telligence Surveillance Act, Executive Order 
12333 and many other privacy-hostile legal 
authorities.