We, the undersigned companies and organizations, are writing to express our support for Chairman Leahy’s and Sen. Lee’s ECPA Amendments Act, S. 607, which the Committee will consider shortly. The bill would update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to provide stronger protection to sensitive personal and proprietary communications stored in “the cloud.” We urge all Members of the Committee to support the bill.

We write to urge you to ensure that any new cybersecurity information sharing bill considered in the Senate in 2013 at least maintains the privacy protections from Title VII, the information sharing title of S. 3414, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. We agree that the protections in Title VII of S. 3414 last year should be considered the privacy floor, and not the ceiling for any cybersecurity legislation. To that end, we would strongly oppose any effort to bring to the Senate floor the information sharing provisions of last year’s SECURE IT bill, or otherwise weaken privacy safeguards.

NACDL respectfully submits the following comments to the Oklahoma House of Representatives in response to the Interim Study to address the privacy questions raised by the operation of unmanned aircraft systems, also known as drones, in Oklahoma. ... NACDL applauds the House of Representatives for taking the first step in studying the privacy implications raised by the use of domestic surveillance drones, and we look forward to ongoing conversations about the privacy and civil liberties impact of this new technology as you move forward with the study.

We the undersigned support ending the bulk collection of all types of data under all legal authorities, while preserving the requirement of prior court approval for surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We recognize the substantial step in this direction the House Judiciary Committee and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took in unanimously passing the USA FREEDOM Act (H.R. 3361). The bill includes several components critical to meaningful reform... We respectfully urge you to oppose efforts to weaken these or other provisions in this historic bill.

We write today to urge the Department of Justice (DOJ) to quickly complete an updated Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Next Generation Identification System (NGI) as part of a broader effort to examine the goals and impact of NGI. The previous PIA on NGI’s face recognition component dates back to 2008. Since that time the program has undergone a radical transformation—one that raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns.

We represent a wide range of privacy and human rights advocates, technology companies, and trade associations that hold an equally wide range of positions on surveillance reform. Many of us have differing views on exactly what reforms must be included in any bill reauthorizing USA PATRIOT Act Section 215, which currently serves as the legal basis for the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata and is set to expire on June 1, 2015. Our broad, diverse, and bipartisan coalition believes that the status quo is untenable and that it is urgent that Congress move forward with reform.

To Director of National Intelligence Coats: The undersigned organizations write to express our dismay at your decision to abandon the effort to estimate the number of Americans whose communications are incidentally collected pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We ask that you reconsider.

To Chair Goodlatte and Ranking Member Conyers: ... If Director Coats remains steadfast in his efforts to evade oversight by the public and this Committee, we urge you to use all powers at your disposal to obtain this number.

... As you consider the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), we strongly urge reforms to ensure this surveillance tool is not improperly co-opted for purely domestic law enforcement purposes, and oppose any reauthorization that does not include substantial reforms. This is critical given America’s history of selective targeting, persecution, and abuse directed at persons of color, religious minorities, and dissidents when the government has obtained surveillance powers absent adequate checks and oversight.

The undersigned organizations write to express concern over the Justice Department’s demand for information associated with a website used to organize protests on Inauguration Day. While the government, in the face of mounting public pressure, has significantly narrowed its initial demand for data on every individual who visited the site, we remain concerned that the government made its sweeping request in the first place – and that it continues to maintain that this request was legal and appropriate.

While full details regarding the bill have not yet been made public, the undersigned groups write to express our concern that the reform as described by the New York Times and The Hill would leave the so-called “backdoor search loophole” wide open. We urge you to ensure that any reform proposal include a full fix requiring all agencies to obtain a warrant based on probable cause to search Section 702 data for information about U.S. citizens and residents in all investigations.

The government uses the backdoor search loophole to conduct warrantless searches for the information of individuals who are not targets of Section 702, including U.S. citizens and residents. Unfortunately, the Section 702 reform bill introduced last week, the USA Liberty Act [H.R. 3989], fails to address many of the concerns raised in our letter. We cannot support the USA Liberty Act at this stage without further changes to strengthen the warrant requirement for searching databases containing Section 702 information.

On behalf of a broad coalition of civil liberties organizations, we write in support of the USA RIGHTS Act [S. 1997], legislation that contains meaningful reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”), which is set to expire at year’s end. These reforms are imperative given our government’s historical abuse of surveillance authorities, contemporary noncompliance with this authority, and the danger posed by potential future abuses.

The undersigned privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, and government oversight organizations write in strong opposition to the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017 (S. 2010). This legislation is masquerading as a moderate “reform” bill. In fact, however, it would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for eight years without making any meaningful reforms to better protect privacy. Indeed, in some respects, the bill represents an expansion of the government’s surveillance authorities under Section 702.

The undersigned groups write to express our strong opposition to H.R. 4478, as amended by the manager’s amendment introduced by Representative Nunes, which is scheduled to be considered at 4 p.m. today. We urge you to vote “no” on this bill. Some have suggested this bill is reform—but it is just the opposite. This bill fails to meaningfully address the litany of abuses that have occurred under Section 702, risks codifying current illegal practices, and could be read as expanding surveillance under Section 702. As such, we believe it is markedly worse than the current Section 702 statute.

NACDL's Fourth Amendment Advocacy Committee carefully and comprehensively studied issues concerning the current United States Postal Service Mail Covers regime following the revelations in The New York Times investigative report in connection with the 2014 U.S. Postal Service audit of the program. The concerns raised by this program and its operation fall squarely within NACDL's long history of advocating for the vitality of Americans' privacy and Fourth Amendment rights -- in the courts, in the legislatures, in executive agencies, and in the public arena. [Released April 2015]