Privacy advocates looking forward to an end of the Unites States government’s mass surveillance program due to the looming sunset of PATRIOT Act section 215 may do well to shelve their Champagne bottles. Judge Andrew Napolitano, in a Fox News interview on Wednesday, presented his grim assessment that the US National Security Agency (NSA) snooping would continue even absent the section 215 authority.
Napolitano, a Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board member, says in the interview that the US government is lying to the American people with the claim that the mass surveillance would be suspended upon the expiration of the PATRIOT Act provision used to justify the mass surveillance program. Instead, Napolitano explains the snooping will continue reliant on two other legal justifications. Napolitano states:
There are two other provisions in the law that the NSA relies on which will cause it to continue to spy on Americans even if section 215 of the PATRIOT Act does expire. One of those is a section of the FISA law called section 702, and one of them is a still-existing executive order signed by President George W. Bush in the fall or 2001, which has not been tinkered with, interfered with, or rescinded.