Patrick Leahy

Patrick Leahy represented Vermont in the U.S. Senate from January 1975 to January 2023. Congress’s own directory records that he was born in Montpelier, Vermont, on 31 March 1940, took a B.A. from St. Michael’s College in 1961 and a J.D. from Georgetown in 1964, served as State’s Attorney for Chittenden County from 1966 to 1974, and was elected to the Senate on 5 November 1974 — the first Democrat and the youngest person from Vermont ever elected to that body. He chaired the Judiciary Committee in the 107th and 113th Congresses, served as President pro tempore of the Senate from 17 December 2012, and chaired the Appropriations Committee in his final Congress.

The PROTECT IP Act

Leahy introduced S. 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act — the PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA — on 12 May 2011. Eleven senators were original cosponsors: Hatch, Grassley, Schumer, Feinstein, Whitehouse, Graham, Kohl, Coons, Blumenthal, Klobuchar and Franken. The bill was directed at foreign-registered websites dedicated to infringement, and would have allowed courts to order intermediaries to act against them. It was the Senate counterpart to the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House.

On 17 December 2011 the Senate began consideration of the motion to proceed to the bill, a motion to close debate was entered, and the cloture vote was set for 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday, 24 January 2012.

That vote never occurred. On 16 January 2012 the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the English Wikipedia community had voted to black the site out for twenty-four hours worldwide from 05:00 UTC on 18 January, in protest against SOPA and PIPA, in concert with other sites — the first public protest of that kind in Wikipedia’s history, decided in a discussion involving more than 1,800 editors. When the Senate returned on 23 January 2012, Majority Leader Reid asked unanimous consent that the cloture motion on the motion to proceed to S. 968 “be vitiated,” and there was no objection. The same day’s record shows seven senators withdrawing as cosponsors — Hatch, Blunt, Rubio, Boozman, Ayotte, Risch and Bennet — with Chambliss and Vitter following on 26 January. A full-text search of the Congressional Record returns no other withdrawals from the bill, giving a total of nine.

Leahy addressed the collapse on the Senate floor the same day. He said he regretted that the Senate would not proceed to debate that week, and that when “Republican Senators who had cosponsored and long supported this effort jumped ship” the Majority Leader faced a difficult decision. He noted that two weeks earlier he had said he took seriously the concerns raised about the bill’s domain name system provisions and would address them in a manager’s amendment, and that the bill had twice been reported unanimously by the Judiciary Committee. Of the blackout he said that Wikipedia’s decision to “go dark” on 18 January “was their choice, self imposed and was not caused by the legislation and could not be,” and that sites had linked to descriptions of the bill that were “misleading and one-sided.”

Post-9/11 Surveillance Legislation

Leahy chaired the Judiciary Committee in the 107th Congress. On 4 October 2001 the Senate’s counterterrorism bill, S. 1510, was introduced in the names of seven senators — Daschle, Lott, Leahy, Hatch, Graham, Shelby and Sarbanes — “to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes.”

Electronic Communications Privacy Act Reform

Leahy pursued amendment of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act across at least three Congresses. He introduced S. 1011, the ECPA Amendments Act of 2011, alone on 17 May 2011; S. 607, the ECPA Amendments Act of 2013, with Senator Lee on 19 March 2013; and was first cosponsor to Senator Lee’s Email Privacy Act, S. 1654, introduced 27 July 2017, which would have updated the privacy protections for communications stored by third-party service providers. Introducing the 2011 bill, he described its aims as eliminating the “180-day rule” that gave a single email different levels of protection depending on where and when it was stored, requiring a search warrant based on probable cause before the government could compel a provider to disclose the content of a customer’s communications, and requiring a warrant or a FISA court order before the government could obtain geolocation information from a mobile device. In the same statement he described himself as having “led the effort to write the ECPA 25 years ago.”

Surveillance Oversight After 2013

As chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the 113th Congress, Leahy presided over the hearing “Strengthening Privacy Rights and National Security: Oversight of FISA Surveillance Programs” on 31 July 2013, printed as S. Hrg. 113-334, at which he gave an opening statement and submitted a prepared statement.

On 29 October 2013 he introduced S. 1599, the USA FREEDOM Act, with Senator Lee as first cosponsor and seventeen other original cosponsors, to reform the government’s authorities to compel production of business records, conduct electronic surveillance and use pen registers for foreign intelligence and counterterrorism purposes. That bill did not become law. In the next Congress the Senate version, S. 1123, was introduced on 28 April 2015 by Senator Lee with Leahy as first cosponsor. The measure that was enacted was H.R. 2048, which became the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015, Public Law 114-23, on 2 June 2015.

What Is Not Established Here

This audit removed a number of claims for which no source meeting the project’s standard was found.

The page previously stated that Leahy “championed” the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. The 1986 legislative record is not reachable through the sources available in this pass — govinfo’s bill text collection begins in 1993, and the bound Congressional Record for 1986 is available only as scanned images. What can be documented is Leahy’s own later description of himself as having led the effort to write ECPA, which is presented above as his statement rather than as an established fact.

Removed for want of a source: the claim that Leahy “was among the earliest senators to engage with internet policy issues”; the account of his role in PATRIOT Act negotiations, including that he “sought to include stronger civil liberties safeguards and sunset provisions” and that “many of these provisions were weakened during negotiations” — the introduced bill establishes only that he was among its seven introducers; the claim that he “co-authored the USA Freedom Act of 2015,” which the bill records contradict in one respect and complicate in another, since he sponsored the 2013 bill that did not pass and was a cosponsor rather than a sponsor of the 2015 Senate bill, while the law itself came from a House vehicle; the assertion that the enacted act “ended the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic phone records and established new transparency requirements,” which was not checked against the statute in this pass; and the entire section on encryption policy, which attributed to Leahy a position opposing legislative mandates for backdoor access following the 2015 San Bernardino case — a full-text search of the Congressional Record for 2015 to 2018 returned nothing supporting it, and the case in question ran into 2016 rather than 2015.

The followerCount field, which read “200,000+ on Twitter during Senate tenure,” was removed as unverifiable; the Congressional Directory confirms only that the account twitter.com/SenatorLeahy existed. The connection to the ACLU, described as working “alongside civil liberties organizations on privacy and surveillance reform,” was removed as unsupported by anything specific. The mainImage URL on the page returned HTTP 404 and its stated dimensions (440x594) were wrong; it has been replaced with the working Wikimedia Commons file, whose true dimensions are 303x414 and whose author of record is the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Not established, and noted as a gap: the widely reported announcement by Majority Leader Reid on 20 January 2012 that he would postpone the PIPA vote. Every first-party route to it — senate.gov and its member subdomains — refused automated access, and the Internet Archive was unavailable throughout this pass. The dates given above are instead taken directly from the Senate’s own proceedings, which record the cloture motion being vitiated on 23 January 2012, the day before the vote was to be held.