Shenna Bellows hadn't much considered a Senate bid until the Snowden revelations. Candidates run vs. NSA

Edward Snowden’s leaks didn’t just cause turmoil in the U.S. intelligence community, prompt international backlash toward President Barack Obama and revive a debate in Congress over civil liberties.

They spawned a whole new breed on the 2014 campaign trail: The anti-National Security Agency candidate.


Take Shenna Bellows in Maine.

The Democratic candidate didn’t think much about running for Senate against the popular GOP Sen. Susan Collins — until the aftermath of the Snowden revelations prompted tougher restrictions on warrantless surveillance on the state level that she now wants to replicate in Washington. Bellows wants an end to the NSA’s bulk data collection program, along with the PATRIOT Act. She argues the country needs stronger whistleblower protections. She even believes Snowden deserves clemency.

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“Constitutional freedoms is how I win the race,” said the 38-year-old Bellows, who headed the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine for eight years and now faces a very steep climb to catch Collins. “I think the erosion of constitutional freedoms exemplifies how Washington has become out of touch with some of the values that we share as communities.”

Candidates across the country are using a similar playbook as they run against an unpopular Washington. Primary candidates running against incumbent GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas have seized on this controversy, hoping to woo Ron Paul-minded libertarian voters worried about government overreach. The main GOP and Democratic candidates in Montana are both bashing the agency as they jostle for an upper hand on the issue.

And Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a likely 2016 presidential candidate who has led the charge against the NSA in Congress, is reviewing candidates’ positions on surveillance as a condition of offering his endorsement to upstart challengers.

Many of these candidates are unlikely to knock off well-financed incumbents. But for Republicans, the debate highlights the growing divide within the party over whether to move sharply away from the national-security hawk mindset that has prevailed since President Ronald Reagan.

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While the outcry over the NSA has become a populist rallying cry for politicians in their bid to woo progressives and libertarians, proponents of the electronic surveillance programs argue that doing away with the ability to collect phone records would fundamentally hurt national security. But senators are plainly aware that the revelations that the U.S. government is collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls have not gone over well back home.

“It seems to be [an issue] that sort of unites the left and sort of the libertarian part of the Republican Party — so there does seem to be concern about it,” said Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate Republican and a national security hawk. “It certainly has gotten my attention.”

In a phone interview from Maine, Collins rebutted criticism that she has not done enough to protect against civil liberties, highlighting legislation she co-sponsored in 2004 that created the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Board and her support for recent proposals to tighten oversight over the surveillance programs. But, she said, doing away with the ability of the government to collect phone records would cause great harm to the country’s ability to root out terrorism.

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“We know that there were plots thwarted solely or partially by the programs, so doing away with it altogether would mean a less safe America,” said Collins, who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and has supported the PATRIOT Act and legislation codifying broader electronic surveillance.

The focus on the campaign trail comes at a critical juncture. Congress is grappling with how to reform the NSA program. In a speech to the Justice Department earlier this month, Obama called for a series of measures to rein in the NSA, including preventing analysts from reviewing phone calls three steps removed from a suspected terrorist; Obama’s plan would limit it to two.

While the U.S. government could still collect billions of records about the so-called metadata of domestic phone calls — details about the timing of calls but not their actual content — Obama left it ultimately to his top national security officials and potentially Congress to hammer out how to construct a new database that would be overseen by an entity other than the NSA, which would need a secret court order to search the database. The FBI, however, could continue to issue national security letters in order to obtain business records without court orders.

Collins said it made little sense to move the records to a nongovernment entity, saying it could make the information “less secure and less private” by making it more susceptible to hackers.

But the fact that Obama didn’t call for an end to its bulk data collection program — or sharply curtail it — didn’t go far enough for either Republican Rep. Steve Daines or Democratic Lt. Gov. John Walsh, the two men who will likely face off in Montana’s Senate race this year.

“I am outraged by the government’s effort to spy on law-abiding Montanans and Americans,” Walsh said Friday. “I don’t know where Congressman Daines stands on this, but I think it could be a defining element of the race if Congressman Daines does not stand up and support and defend Montanans’ and Americans’ civil liberties.”

But Daines suggested that he and Walsh were on the same page, blasting the president for falling short of his calls to dramatically rein in the NSA.

“In Montana, we’re in the West, where personal freedom, privacy and liberty — these aren’t Republican issues, they’re not Democrat issues — really, they are [part of] an independent streak that we have in Montana,” Daines said.

Also in the West, Sen. Mark Udall — the Colorado Democrat and early critic of the NSA — is quick to point out the alarms he sounded even before the Snowden revelations. That, he said, will be a big selling point to voters as he faces what could be a tough reelection battle.

“I think it will be one of the reasons I’ll ask to be rehired — I want to protect Coloradans’ privacy,” Udall said. “They know I will, they know I have. They know I was on this cause before it was popular, before anybody paid any attention.”

The divisions are far starker in the GOP, with competing libertarian and national security wings battling for the future direction of the Republican Party. In a sign that the GOP is heading in a more libertarian direction, the Republican National Committee called on Friday to investigate the NSA for what it called the “invasion into the personal lives” of American citizens and their constitutional rights.

Paul said in a brief interview that the issue of privacy is “a popular one” that “appeals to people who aren’t traditionally in one camp or the other.” Asked if he would base his endorsement of 2014 Senate candidates partially on their views on the NSA program, Paul said simply, “Yes.”

In North Carolina’s contested GOP Senate primary, Paul has endorsed physician Greg Brannon, who called Obama’s latest proposals “nothing more than slight modifications to an unconstitutional program.”

But the issue is becoming a bigger flash point in South Carolina, where Graham — a longtime national security hawk — has previously said he was “glad” the government was collecting the phone records of Verizon customers.

“I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States,” Graham said last year.

Those comments have made it difficult for Graham to appeal to libertarian-leaning conservatives, who could be a critical bloc in this year’s primary, according to one of his GOP opponents, state Sen. Lee Bright.

“That crowd and Lindsey Graham will never get along,” Bright said last week, adding that the senator’s Verizon comment “pretty much finished off any hope he had for the folks who were really concerned about the Fourth Amendment.”

Bellows, the Maine candidate far behind in the polls against Collins, sees a similar libertarian-type mindset among voters in her state — even though both she and Collins both said that the economy and jobs would the No. 1 issue in their campaign.

Still, Bellows noted that Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) pushed the issue of constitutional freedom on the campaign trail in 2012, something she hopes to replicate this year. (In a statement, King called Collins a “valuable voice in the debate surrounding privacy rights and civil liberties.”)

“I think she was wrong to vote time and time again to renew the PATRIOT Act without meaningful checks and balances, … she was wrong to vote in November 2013 to legalize the NSA program in the wake of these revelations of abuse,” said Bellows.

While Bellows said Snowden has made a positive contribution by shining a light on vast U.S. government overreach, Collins said Snowden was responsible for one of the most “serious national security breaches” in modern history.

“He’s no hero,” Collins said. “He’s no whistleblower.”