The US House of Representatives has moved the US closer to ending the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of US citizens’ telephone records, the most significant demonstration to date of whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s impact on the nation’s debate over privacy and security.
However, the final version of the legislation, “watered down” in the words of one supporter, also showed the limits of that impact.
The bill was severely weakened to mollify US intelligence agencies, which insisted that the surveillance programs that shocked many US citizens are a critical bulwark against terror plots.
The bill was approved 303-121, which means that most House members can now say they voted to end what many critics consider the most troubling practice that Snowden disclosed — the collection and storage of US calling data by the secretive intelligence agency. However, almost no other major provision designed to restrict NSA surveillance, including limits on the secret court that grants warrants to search the data, survived the negotiations to get the bill to the House floor.
Even the prohibition on bulk collection of US citizens’ communications records has been called into question by some activists who say a last-minute change in wording diminished what was sold as a ban.
“People will say: ‘We did something, and isn’t something enough?’” said Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues for the Federation of American Scientists. “But this bill doesn’t fundamentally resolve the uncertainties that generated the whole controversy.”
Though some privacy activists continued to back the bill, others withdrew support, as did technology companies, such as Google and Facebook.
US Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said: “I believe this is a workable compromise that protects the core function of a counterterrorism program we know has saved lives around the world.”
The measure now heads to the US Senate, where Democratic US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters on Thursday that “we must do something.”
Called the “USA FREEDOM Act,” the bill would codify a proposal made in January by US President Barack Obama, who said he wanted to end the NSA’s practice of collecting and storing the “to and from” records of nearly every US landline telephone call under a program that searched the data for connections to terrorist plots abroad.
The telephone records program was revealed though the leaks last year by Snowden, who allegedly used his job as a computer network administrator to remove an unknown number of reportedly secret documents from an NSA facility in Hawaii. Snowden fled first to China, then Russia, where he is avoiding an extradition order to face criminal charges related to the alleged revelation of classified information.
The telephone companies create and store those billing records and the legislation still would give the NSA authority to request batches of data from the companies to search in terrorism investigations in response to a judicial order. Law enforcement agents routinely obtain such records in criminal investigations.
The USA FREEDOM Act started its life as the idea of those who wanted to clamp down on NSA surveillance, but it was “watered down,” as US Representative Jan Schakowsky acknowledged, shedding a series of provisions favored by civil liberties activists.
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