House committee approves bill to end NSA phone records program
House committee approves bill to end NSA phone records
program
Grant Gross By Grant Gross Follow
IDG News Service | Apr 30, 2015 12:05 PM PT
A U.S. Congress committee has overwhelmingly approved
legislation designed to stop the bulk collection of U.S. phone records by the
National Security Agency.
The 25-2 vote in the House of Representatives Judiciary
Committee sends the USA Freedom Act to the House floor for a vote. The two
votes against the bill came from lawmakers who had argued for stronger
protections for civil liberties.
The legislation is a stronger version of a similar bill
that passed the House last May but stalled in the Senate, sponsors said.
However, several efforts to further strengthen privacy protections by amending
the bill failed in committee. Opponents said changes would upend a carefully
crafted compromise with House Republican leaders who have threatened to kill an
amended bill.
“The USA Freedom Act ends bulk collection, increases
transparency and stops secret laws” made in the U.S. surveillance court, said
Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and primary sponsor of
the bill.
The NSA’s collection of huge numbers of U.S. telephone
records relies on a “blatant misreading” of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act,
added Sensenbrenner, the primary author of that 2001 law. The USA Freedom Act
would “reestablish a proper balance between privacy and national security.”
Lawmakers in both the House and the Senate introduced
versions of the USA Freedom Act earlier this week. Starting in mid-2013, leaks
from former agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has
conducted mass collection of U.S. telephone records, but not of the content of
phone calls.
The committee struck down a handful of amendments
designed to strengthen privacy protections or further limit NSA collection of
U.S. residents’ communications or records. A much-debated amendment would have
prohibited the FBI and other agencies from searching the content of email
messages, text messages and phone calls belonging to U.S. residents when those
communications are swept up in a second NSA program targeting foreign
terrorists.
That NSA program, separate from its collection of
so-called metadata of phone records, allows the FBI access to the content of
“tens of thousands” of emails and other communications, said Representative Zoe
Lofgren, a California Democrat. The USA Freedom Act is a “vast improvement”
over the ongoing NSA phone records program, but “the idea that this bill ends
bulk collection ... is a fantasy,” she said.
The amendment, offered by Lofgren and Representative Ted
Poe, a Texas Republican, would have also prohibited U.S. government agencies
from pressuring tech vendors into building surveillance back doors into their
products. In recent months, the FBI and other officials in President Barack
Obama’s administration have called on tech companies to allow law enforcement
access to encrypted communications on smartphones.
The House, last June, overwhelmingly approved a similar
amendment in a Department of Defense funding bill, Lofgren noted, although the
amendment was stripped out before final approval.
Sensenbrenner and several other committee members voiced
support for the ideas in the amendment, but said Republican leaders in the
House have promised to kill the USA Freedom Act if it includes language to
limit the NSA program targeting the content of messages sent to and from
suspected terrorists.
The amendment would be a “poison pill” for the bill at a
time when Senate Republican leaders are gearing up to pass an extension to the
Patriot Act’s phone records collection program with no new limits,
Sensenbrenner said.
Several opponents of the amendment promised to work with
sponsors to pass it another way. Backers of the amendment can attach it to
“every appropriations bill that comes down the pike,” said Representative
Darrell Issa, a California Republican. Under House rules, the chamber’s leaders
generally cannot limit the type of amendments offered.
Backers of the amendment complained that the committee
was bowing to political pressure instead of protecting U.S. residents’ Fourth
Amendment constitutional rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Judiciary Committee needs to uphold constitutional
protections, Poe said. “We’re not talking about postponing building a bridge,”
he said. “We’re talking about postponing the Fourth Amendment.”
The USA Freedom Act would prohibit large-scale collection
of business records from an entire state, city, or zip code. It would also
allow businesses who get records requests from the FBI through its national
security letter program to challenge orders requiring those businesses to keep
quiet.
The bill would also create a new panel of experts at the
U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to advise judges about privacy and
civil liberties, communications technology, and other technical or legal
matters.
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