| "Our bill ensures that no investigation will be compromised, but makes sure the government can't hide surveillance forever by misusing sealing and gag orders to prevent the American people from understanding the enormous scale of government surveillance," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who is leading the bill with Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), said in a statement. The legislation boasts broad backing, with Democratic and Republican support in both the Senate and House, where lawmakers are introducing a companion measure. That's crucial for its chances of advancing on Capitol Hill. Other backers include Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Warren Davidson (R-Ohio). The proposal has also been endorsed by a slew of privacy and digital rights groups, including Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Color of Change and the Brennan Center for Justice. Scrutiny of these surveillance practices ballooned after it was revealed that the Trump Justice Department secretly subpoenaed email records from numerous journalists — including at The Washington Post — in an attempt to identify their sources of leaked information. The disclosures ushered in a wave of congressional oversight, including a hearing last June that featured testimony from an executive at Microsoft. Microsoft's Tom Burt said in his written testimony that while the revelations about the scope of the Justice Department's actions were "shocking," they were not surprising. "What may be most shocking is just how routine court-mandated secrecy has become when law enforcement targets Americans' emails, text messages, and other sensitive data stored in the cloud," Burt wrote. According to a report last year by The Post's Drew Harwell and Jay Greene, "Facebook, Google and other technology companies receive hundreds of thousands of orders from law enforcement agencies seeking data people stash online." They wrote at the time that, "In the last six months of 2020, Facebook received 61,262 government requests for user data in the United States, said spokesman Andy Stone. Most — 69 percent — came with secrecy orders. Meanwhile, Microsoft has received between 2,400 and 3,500 secrecy orders from federal law enforcement each year since 2016." Since the DOJ revelations, tech companies have grown increasingly vocal in speaking out against surveillance on their services and gag orders against their customers. | 
