NSA-Reforming USA Freedom Act Passes House Committee
More stringent protections against domestic surveillance spiked in interest of speed.
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., swatted back five proposed amendments to the USA Freedom Act from Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., during a Wednesday hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.
After a significant amount of grandstanding and a round-robin of complimenting one another, members of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday unanimously approved the USA Freedom Act, which would scale back the U.S. government’s domestic surveillance programs.
A rival bill written by the National Security Agency’s most vocal supporters will be heard behind closed doors Thursday morning by the House Intelligence Committee.
If passed into law, the USA Freedom Act – as amended in committee – would allow the NSA to collect the phone records of individuals and two “hops” through their contacts if officials can convince a judge there’s reasonable suspicion a targeted individual is a terrorist. The bill would ban the government from invoking pen register or National Security Letter statutes to conduct bulk phone-record collection.
The rival bill would not require judicial approval before records are taken from phone companies.
The NSA currently collects and stores all American phone records for about five years. Exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed that collection program – which featured warrantless database searches – in June 2013.
Primary bill sponsor, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., urged his colleagues to accept a 35-page package of changes unveiled Monday that rewrote much of the bill in order to win approval from committee leaders. Changes to the phone record part of the bill were made following meetings with Obama administration officials.
After debating proposed amendments, all 32 voting committee members endorsed sending the bill to the House floor.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., declined to quietly accept the compromise rewrite of the bill, warning repeatedly that loopholes and vagueness could result in creative interpretations and abuses.
“We don't want to end up in the same situation a few years from now as we are today, finding out that we have failed to define terms and have allowed for the kind of unwarranted bulk collection that we are seeking to end today,” Lofgren said.
Sensenbrenner, author of the 2001 USA Patriot Act – which NSA attorneys secretly convinced the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to interpret as allowing dragnet phone surveillance – rebutted Lofgren's amendments, saying they would jeopardize the bill’s chances and slow down the process.
One of Lofgren’s amendments would have required a probable cause standard for seizing phone records – more stringent than the proposed reasonable suspicion standard.
“The creative interpretation of language has led the nation to places where in some places we were surprised to find ourselves,” she said.
Sensenbrenner scoffed that the amendment “would raise a routine request for information to the standard of a search warrant.”
“I fear this may blow up the fast-tracked passage that this bill appears to be having,” he said.
The amendment was soundly defeated by a voice vote.
Another of Lofgren’s amendments would have removed foreign affairs from the definition of foreign intelligence information in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
It “invites abusive practices, using foreign affairs as an excuse” to collect electronic communications, she said.
Sensenbrenner opposed the change, conceding that while NSA surveillance of ordinary Americans was a problem he “would certainly not want to hamper the ability of the government … to deal with non-terrorist spying.”
That amendment also failed.
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