In the News
House Takes Major Step to End NSA Mass SurveillanceHouse Takes Major Step to End NSA Mass Surveillance
Washington, DC,
May 7, 2014
Tags:
National Security
A House committee on Wednesday passed a bill that seeks to effectively end one of the National Security Agency's most controversial spy programs. With unanimous support, the House Judiciary Committee approved 32-0 an amended version of the USA Freedom Act, which would limit the government's ability to collect bulk metadata of Americans' phone records. Among its several reform provisions, the Freedom Act would move the storage of phone metadata—the numbers and call durations but not the contents of a call—out of the government and into the hands of the phone companies. The bill, authored by Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, only allows data collection for counterterrorism purposes, and it reduces from three to two the number of "hops," or degrees of separation, away from a target the NSA can jump when analyzing communications. It also would require the NSA to earn approval to search a phone number from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court except in emergency cases. A competing bill from Reps. Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House Intelligence Committee respectively, would allow the NSA to search a number before judicial review.
The USA Freedom Act has long been championed by privacy and civil-liberty advocates, who viewed it as the best option to curtail the NSA's mass-surveillance programs, the classified details of which were publicly disclosed by Edward Snowden last June. But the amended version of the bill released this week drew some criticism from privacy hard-liners, who said it had lost some of the protections granted in the original. Several lawmakers acknowledged those criticisms during debate. The amended bill "is a less-than-perfect compromise, [but] it makes important substantive changes that will work to restore confidence in the intelligence community," said Rep. John Conyers, the Judiciary panel's top Democrat. But privacy groups and tech companies did score some victories during the vote. The committee passed a data-request transparency amendment introduced by Rep. Suzan DelBene that had been heavily pushed by tech companies. It would codify an agreement those companies have with the Justice Department that gives them more flexibility in how they notify consumers of the kinds and amount of user data they turn over to the government upon request. To read the full article, click HERE. |