News Tip: Patriot Act Reforms Sufficient to Protect Privacy, Prohibit Governmental Abuse, Expert Says

If Congress does not act, only three provisions of the Patriot Act will expire on Sunday, and the vast majority of the law will remain in effect. The current debate is about Section 215 of the Patriot Act that provides the legal basis for the telephone metadata program run by the National Security Agency.•    Quotes: “I am in favor of allowing this program to continue with the significant reforms included in the USA Freedom Act, which passed the House with a large bipartisan majority," says David Schanzer, an associate professor of the practice at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. "Even though the intelligence agencies cannot point to a specific terrorist attack that has been disrupted based on information from this program, I side with the many intelligence and senior national security officials who believe it is an important counterterrorism tool.""The reforms will prohibit the government from taking possession of huge volumes of Americans’ telephone records and require a judicial warrant for the government to gain access to specific chains of metadata. These changes are sufficient to protect privacy and protect against governmental abuse.""The most likely scenario for this week is for the Senate to take up the USA Freedom Act, a step supported by 57 of the necessary 60 senators last week. If the bill does get to the floor, Sen. Rand Paul and other opponents of the NSA program can slow its progress, but probably cannot defeat it. Legal authority for the program may lapse briefly into next week, but this would not cause any significant problems."•    Bio:David Schanzer is an associate professor of the practice at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, a collaboration between Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and RTI International. He is an expert on counterterrorism and homeland security. From 2003-2005, Schanzer was a Democratic staff director for the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security.http://sanford.duke.edu/people/faculty/schanzer-david-h•    Archive video interviews (on Boston Marathon bombings): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-5LZuoZpIEhttp://live.huffingtonpost.co...•    For more comment, contact David Schanzer at:schanzer@duke.edu