We already wrote how the main backer of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, has said that it was never intended to allow dragnet surveillance of all phone records, as recently revealed. However, it appears he's not done yet in fighting back against this abusive interpretation of the law he sponsored and championed. He's now claiming that those who are defending the NSA and claiming that there's no big deal in having the NSA collect all that data are spewing "a bunch of bunk" directly claiming that the key provision of the Patriot Act, Section 215, was drafted to prevent such data mining.
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Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, who introduced the PATRIOT Act on the House floor in 2001, has declared that lawmakers' and the executive branch's excuses about recent revelations of NSA activity are "a bunch of bunk."He also claims that people calling Ed Snowden a traitor are off base because without Snowden, he wouldn't have known how the Patriot Act was being abused. That's quite an incredible statement when you think about it. While we can argue that Sensenbrenner, given his role in Congress, probably had an obligation to further investigate how the law was being used -- especially given the warnings raised by other members of Congress -- it still seems to weigh pretty heavily in favor of showing how valuable these disclosures have been as whistleblowing. The very author of the Patriot Act claims that the leaks enabled him to realize that the law is being used in direct contrast to his intentions. Perhaps it's now time to fix that.
In an interview on Laura Ingraham's radio show Wednesday morning, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin reiterated his concerns that the administration and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court have gone far beyond what the PATRIOT Act intended. Specifically, he said that Section 215 of the act "was originally drafted to prevent data mining" on the scale that's occurred.
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