Sides voice stances over data roundup

Disagreement triggers unusual alliances

Senate Democrats said Sunday that they’ll move forward with efforts to curb the National Security Agency’s ability to collect telephone records on millions of Americans, after the House of Representatives narrowly defeated a proposal to limit the spy agency’s intelligence gathering.

“It’s clear that the sentiment is growing for oversight,” Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat, said on ABC’s This Week, discussing last week’s House vote.

Durbin said that he supports limits on the collection of metadata from telephone calls and said that the courts deciding on the legality of the collection efforts should have “a real court proceeding.”

President Barack Obama’s administration opposed the House proposal.

The U.S. intelligence collection programs have brought about intense debate since they were disclosed by fugitive U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden, who has holed up in a Moscow airport since arriving there June 23 in an attempt to gain asylum.

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., who has introduced a bill requiring the government to provide specific evidence of justification before gaining access to private records, said indiscriminate data collection is a violation of Americans’ privacy.

“When we’re collecting in bulk all of these records of Americans’ phone calls, we’re not necessarily being any more effective at protecting the country,” he said on the CBS program Face the Nation.

The House narrowly rejected a proposal Wednesday to prevent the National Security Agency from using funds to collect the telephone records. The restriction was an amendment to the annual Defense Department spending bill and would have limited intelligence agencies’ telephone-record collecting only to individuals who are under an investigation authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“What you’re doing is taking away the one tool that we know will allow us to make a nexus between a foreign terrorist overseas talking to someone in the United States,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, appearing on Face the Nation.

There are “zero privacy violations” in the National Security Agency’s data-collection program, Rogers said.

Debate over the House measure has produced unusual alliances, with the White House and many Republicans - typically at odds - allied against the proposal. On the other side were the libertarian wing of the Republican Party and Democrats concerned over the government’s intrusion on privacy rights.

“Let’ have advocate for someone standing up for civil liberties to speak up about the privacy of Americans when they make each of these decisions,” Durbin said.

The close vote in the House ensures debate over curbing government surveillance powers will continue, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told reporters. The amendment was spearheaded by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., who told reporters after the vote he would try to attach similar language to other bills.

Agency has said it is collecting only metadata on all U.S. calls, such as telephone numbers and duration, and that agency officials access the data only when needed for terrorism investigations.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans a hearing Wednesday to examine whether changes should be made to the legal authorities underpinning the government’s electronic surveillance powers.

Information for this article was contributed by Clea Benson and Mark Drajem of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 5 on 07/29/2013

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