House OKs NSA power curbs

Tech firms say measure stops short of what’s needed

An undated aerial handout photo shows the National Security Agency headquarters building at Fort Meade, Md.
An undated aerial handout photo shows the National Security Agency headquarters building at Fort Meade, Md.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted Thursday to curb some National Security Agency powers in legislation that Internet companies and privacy advocates say won't do enough to prevent spying on innocent Americans.

The bill, approved 303-121, would end the domestic spying program under which the agency collects and stores as much as five years' worth of phone records on Americans. The bill arrives almost one year after the spying was exposed in documents leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.

For Arkansas, U.S. Reps. Tom Cotton, Rick Crawford, Tim Griffin and Steve Womack -- all Republicans -- voted for the bill.

A group of technology companies, including Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and Apple Inc., opposed the bill because of what it called an "unacceptable loophole that could enable the bulk collection of Internet users' data." Some lawmakers who voted against the bill agreed that the legislation should be stronger.

"We have learned that if we leave any ambiguity in the law, the intelligence agencies will run a truck right through that ambiguity," Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said during debate Thursday on the House floor.

In the last days before the vote, intelligence officials and members of President Barack Obama's administration watered down the original bill by the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, turning many technology companies and advocates against it.

"If House leaders had backed up their members and stood behind the bill that passed unanimously out of two committees, rather than caving to the intelligence community's list of demands, a much stronger reform bill would have passed the House this morning," said Kevin Bankston, the policy director at the Open Technology Institute, a technology advocacy group. "This is not the surveillance reform that Americans deserve and have demanded."

The bill would still need to be approved by the Senate before being sent to Obama. The White House on Wednesday said the president supports the measure because its "significant reforms would provide the public greater confidence in our programs and the checks and balances in the system."

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., the chief sponsor of the legislation, said negotiations with the Obama administration "were intense," and the bill will prevent the National Security Agency from collecting records in bulk.

"We had to make compromises," Sensenbrenner said. "But this bill still does deserve support. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good."

Sensenbrenner said passing the bill "is a first step and not a final step in our efforts to reform surveillance.

"We have turned the tables on the NSA and can say to them: We are watching you," he said.

Lofgren and Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, said they supported the bill as drafted by the House Judiciary Committee. However, they said they couldn't support the final changes made to the bill.

"These changes appear to allow multiple interpretations as to what the NSA can and cannot do," Poe said on the House floor Thursday. "The NSA is out of control. It seizes massive amounts of data on Americans without their consent."

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, indicated that the bill is all that will be done legislatively this year to change NSA spying.

"I do believe this will address the issues that need to be addressed at the NSA for this year," he told reporters.

Boehner said he wasn't aware of the specific concerns by Internet companies and that "their views were clearly represented in the discussion that came to this agreement."

Carriers' opposition

The bill's centerpiece focuses on the power of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue orders allowing the government to obtain business records deemed relevant to a national security investigation.

The court secretly interpreted that provision as allowing the NSA to systematically collect calling records for the purpose of hunting for hidden associates of terrorism suspects. The bill instead would allow the agency to obtain only the calling records of people up to two links from a suspect, a change that Obama has endorsed.

Those records would now be held by Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc. and other phone carriers. The government would have to get an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to compel the carriers to search the records for counterterrorism investigations. The bill also includes provisions for emergency circumstances.

The bill seeks to limit bulk collection more broadly by saying that such court orders -- as well as administrative subpoenas for records, known as national security letters -- may be used only to obtain records associated with a "specific selection term," including a type of device or an address.

The bill's original text, however, limited the government's data requests to those associated with specific people, entities or accounts.

Some privacy groups said they fear that that wording change will allow the government to collect huge volumes of records -- including, for example, records of all the phone calls made from a particular U.S. city during a certain period, or all the Internet data associated with a particular commercial router.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the Intelligence Committee, said the vagueness was designed to protect the government's surveillance methods, not to facilitate secret bulk collection.

Other provisions that were dropped from the bill included requirements to estimate the number of Americans whose records were captured under the program, and the creation of a public advocate to challenge the government's legal arguments before the secret surveillance court.

The measure largely codifies a Jan. 26 agreement that Facebook, Apple and other companies reached with the Justice Department to disclose details about how often they turn over data about their users in response to government national security requests.

However, the group of Internet and technology companies, called the Reform Government Surveillance coalition, has said it wants to be able to disclose more.

It said Wednesday that the legislation "has moved in the wrong direction." The coalition formed last year to distance Internet companies from perceptions that they willingly cooperated with government surveillance programs.

"While it makes important progress, we cannot support this bill as currently drafted and urge Congress to close this loophole to ensure meaningful reform," the coalition said in a Wednesday statement.

The coalition supports limits on the government's ability to collect data about their users and permission "to publish the number and nature of government demands for user information," according to its website.

The House Rules Committee on Thursday didn't allow any amendments to the bill on the House floor.

Attention now turns to the Senate, where members have indicated support for similar legislation. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to consider the bill in June, said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the panel.

Leahy said the House vote "continues the bipartisan effort to restore Americans' civil liberties," though he was disappointed that the bill doesn't include "meaningful reforms" that were in the original version. He vowed to push for those changes through his panel.

Information for this article was contributed by Chris Strohm and Derek Wallbank of Bloomberg News; by Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times; and by Ken Dilanian of The Associated Press.

A Section on 05/23/2014

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